PROGRESS  IN  RELIGION 
TO   THE    CHRISTIAN    ERA 


PROGRESS   IN    RELIGION 
TO  THE  CHRISTIAN  ERA 


BY 

T.  R.  GLOVER 

FELLOW   OF   ST.   JOHN'S   COLLEGE,    CAMBRIDGE, 
AND  PUBLIC  ORATOR  IN  THE  UNIVERSITY 

Author  of  "The  Pilgrim,"  "The  Nature  and  Purpose  of  a 

Christian  Society"  "Jesus  in  the  Experience  of 

Men,"  "The  Jesus  of  History"  etc. 


NEW  X         YORK 
GEORGE  H.  DORAN  COMPANY 


COPYRIGHT,   1922. 
BY  GEORGE  H.  DORAN  COMPANY 


PROGRESS  IN  RELIGION  TO  THE  CHRISTIAN  ERA.     II 


PRINTED  IN  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 


LIBRARY 

UMVERSITY  OF  CALIFORtt 
8AJXXA  BARBARA 


CONTENTS 


PAGE 


I  INTRODUCTION 9 

II  EARLY  MAN  AND  His  ENVIRONMENT  .       .  29 

III  HOMER 54 

IV  THE  BEGINNINGS  OF  GREEK  CRITICISM        .  77 
V  EARLIER  ISRAEL 104 

VI  THE  HEBREW  PROPHETS 129 

VII  THE  GREAT  CENTURY  OF  GREECE  .       .       .  155 

VIII  PLATO 180 

IX  THE  GREEK  WORLD  AFTER  ALEXANDER      .  200 

X  THE  STOICS 220 

XI  THE  JEWS  AFTER  THE  EXILE        .       .       .  240 

XII  THE  GODS  OF  THE  ORIENT     ....  260 

XIII  ROMAN  RELIGION 284 

XIV  JUDAISM  AFTER  ANTIOCHUS  ....  306 
XV  THE  VICTORY  OF  THE  ORIENT  331 


PROGRESS  IN  RELIGION 
TO   THE   CHRISTIAN    ERA 


PROGRESS    IN   RELIGION 
TO  THE  CHRISTIAN  ERA 


INTRODUCTION 

FASCINATING  as  the  course  of  research  has  been  among 
the  religious  ideas  of  primitive  peoples — and  those  who 
caught  the  gleam  of  the  Golden  Bough  a  quarter  of  a 
century  since  will  not  readily  forget  its  appeal — the  his- 
tory of  Religion  includes  many  races  who  are  not  at  all 
primitive.  The  time  comes  now  and  then  when  it  is  less 
urgent  to  ask  how  religion  began  than  why  it  continues 
and  what  changes  it  has  undergone.  In  some  quarters, 
one  guesses,  the  view  has  prevailed  that,  if  the  origins 
are  lowly,  the  developed  product  is  discredited — that  if 
religion  began  in  the  grossest  superstition  or  in  close  con- 
nection with  it,  and  was  for  long  almost  indistinguishable 
from  magic,  so  much  the  worse  for  religion.  There  has 
been  an  air  of  polemic  about  the  work  of  certain  re- 
searchers, which  at  least  suggests  this  line  of  reflection. 
But  another  line  seems  equally  possible.  If,  in  spite  of 
these  unhappy  early  associations,  religion  has  maintained 
itself  in  the  respect  of  the  peoples  of  the  highest  cultures 
— if  with  every  advance  in  thought,  in  powers  of  seeing 
and  feeling,  in  social  culture  and  in  morals,  religion  has 
kept  pace — then  it  may  at  least  be  argued  that  religion 
is  not  a  regrettable  survival  from  a  bad  past,  a  weakness 
of  the  feebler  spirits  of  the  race — an  accident  at  best — 
but  something  inseparable  from  the  rational  life  of  man, 

9 


10  PROGRESS  IN  RELIGION 

something  as  inherent  in  human  nature  and  as  essential 
to  it  as  art  or  morality  or  any  other  expression  and  means 
of  human  life.  This  is  arguable,  at  least.  In  any  case, 
if  the  study  of  origins  is  a  legitimate  subject  for  the 
human  mind,  surely  the  study  of  what  is  developed  from 
those  origins  needs  no  defence.  All  our  educationists 
emphasise  the  value  of  child-study :  can  we  suggest  that 
grown  people  are  not  a  proper  study  of  mankind? 

In  any  case,  there  are  religions  of  the  higher  culture 
— and,  without  beating  about  the  bush,  I  am  more  in- 
terested in  them  myself;  I  have  studied  them,  and  I  pro- 
pose to  continue  to  study  them.  So,  with  no  more 
apology,  I  turn  to  my  subject — Progress  in  Religion. 

In  Cambridge — it  is  our  reproach — we  are  perhaps  a 
little  more  matter-of-fact  than  Oxford  people,  a  little 
more  content  to  confine  ourselves  to  verifying  our  ref- 
erences and  to  recording  what  we  find.  I  will  not  defend 
our  habit  of  mind;  it  is  so  obviously  useful  and  so  essen- 
tially scientific.  But  in  this  book  my  object  is  something 
different.  I  am  not  aiming  at  making  a  complete  epitome 
of  the  history  of  religion  from  Moses  to  Mrs.  Eddy.  I 
am  rather  pursuing  what  one  of  the  keenest  guides  of 
my  undergraduate  youth  somewhat  truculently  called 
"the  spirit  of  History  emancipated  from  the  bonds  of 
fact."  I  hope  not  to  part  company  with  fact,  but  I  do 
not  want  to  be  in  bondage  to  it;  it  is  the  wood  and  its 
habits  that  I  wish  to  understand,  not  to  count  the  trees. 
This  will  involve  a  tentative  use  of  theory  as  well  as  of 
fact.  My  endeavour  is  to  get  hold  of  the  factors  that 
make  for  progress  in  men's  religious  ideas — to  under- 
stand why  mankind  as  a  whole  is  always  apt  to  be  re- 
vising its  religion  and  cannot  let  it  alone.  I  also  want 
to  master  the  factors  that  make  for  retardation  in  this 
progress.  I  turn  naturally  to  the  peoples  of  the  ancient 
Mediterranean  world — the  peoples  who,  since  I  first 


INTRODUCTION  11 

learnt  to  read,  have  been  my  chief  study,  to  whom  I  am 
not  at  all  ashamed  to  have  given  my  life  so  far — and  I 
propose  to  draw  from  them  the  main  part  of  what  I 
have  to  say  on  progress  in  religion. 

The  comparative  study  of  religion  began  a  long  time 
ago.  Xenophanes,  as  we  shall  see,  noted  the  divergencies 
of  men's  conceptions  of  the  gods.  Herodotus  marked 
coincidences  and  shrewdly  suspected  certain  religious 
teachers,  whose  names  he  would  not  mention,  of 
plagiarising  their  inspiration  from  Egypt.  Justin  and 
Tertullian  in  the  second  century  of  our  era  remarked 
similarities  between  the  rites  of  the  Christian  Church  and 
the  heathens.  "This,  too,"  says  Justin,  "in  the  rites 'of 
Mithras,  the  evil  demons  have  delivered  to  be  done — in 
imitation.  That  bread  and  a  cup  of  water  are  set  forth 
in  the  initiation  ceremonies  with  certain  formulae — you 
know  or  may  learn." *  "The  devil,"  says  Tertullian, 
"baptises.  He  promises  remission  of  sins  from  his  font. 
If  I  yet  remember,  Mithras  seals  his  soldiers  on  the 
brow" ;  2  and  so  forth.  The  current  explanation  has  gen- 
erally been  borrowing.  The  devil  and  his  daemons  got 
early  word  of  what  Christian  rites  would  be — and  bor- 
rowed. Or  else,  say  some  modern  scholars,  the  Chris- 
tians, remembering  their  old  ways  in  religion,  borrowed 
on  their  side.  The  explanation  of  Justin  and  Tertullian 
seems  a  little  old  and  odd ;  the  fashion  to-day  is  to  find 
analogies  between  Christian  practice  and  the  mystery  re- 
ligions, and  a  little  to  discredit  the  Christian  in  conse- 
quence. 

The  weakness  of  this  line  of  comparative  study  seems 
to  me  to  be  that  it  does  not  reckon  with  development. 
Likeness  in  rite  and  ceremony,  in  phrase  and  even  in 
ideas,  there  may  be;  and  it  may  be  of  singularly  little 
consequence.  The  questions  to  be  asked  are  of  the  move- 

l  Justin,  Apoc.  i.  g8C.  2  Tertullian,  De  praescr.  heeret.  40. 


12  PROGRESS  IN  RELIGION 

ment,  the  direction,  the  guiding  spirit,  the  purpose,  the 
aspiration.  Two  sacraments  may  be  closely  alike — to  the 
distant  student — at  a  particular  point  of  time ;  and  their 
influence  on  human  history  unspeakably  different.  We 
have  always  to  bear  in  mind  that  there  is  a  stage  beyond, 
and  that  what  matters  in  the  study  of  a  religion  is  what 
bears  most  upon  the  stage  not  yet  reached.  The  key  is 
in  the  last  stage,  the  highest  development,  as  Aristotle 
said.  Our  task  is  not  to  predict  the  last  stage,  but  to 
examine  certain  stages,  and  to  discover,  if  we  can,  the 
disturbing  forces,  the  factors  that  have  from  time  to  time 
made  the  future,  that  have  driven  men  forward  in  spite 
of  themselves. 

Let  us  begin  by  a  broad  contrast  of  what  have  been 
and  what  are  the  commonly  accepted  conceptions  of  re- 
ligion. At  the  dawn  of  History,  and  for  very  long  after, 
men  conceived  of  religion  as  a  matter  of  practices — cer- 
tain things  were  done,  and  done  in  certain  ways ;  the  way 
mattered,  and  the  action  mattered,  not  the  spirit,  nor  the 
belief  that  went  with  it.  To-day,  on  the  contrary,  we 
conceive  of  religion  as  being  above  all  things  belief— 
as  faith;  and  ritual  and  ceremony,  however  desirable, 
however  necessary  some  hold  them,  are  admittedly  only 
of  value  as  expressions  of  real  belief,  of  faith.  Religion 
has  changed,  then,  from  being  predominantly  an  external 
thing  to  being  the  most  intensely  inward  and  intimate 
of  all  things,  a  law,  an  intuition  within.  It  was  a  tradi- 
tional thing — inherited,  unexamined,  independent  of  rea- 
son, unconnected  with  moral  judgment  or  moral  conduct ; 
but  it  is  individual  conviction,  and  even  where  tradition 
is  given  the  utmost  value,  it  is  as  a  result  of  criticism  and 
thought,  and  these  are  individual;  religion  without  rea- 
son is  inconceivable  to  us,  and  we  hold  its  relation  to 
morality  to  be  vital.  It  was  racial  or  local;  it  is,  and  long 
has  been,  even  in  pre-Christian  times  and  non-Jewish 


INTRODUCTION  13 

circles,  universal,  independent  of  race  or  place.  It  was 
a  system  of  polytheism  with  all  the  inherent -disorder  that 
polytheism  involves ;  its  gods  were  at  best  doubtfully  per- 
sonal, or  if  personal,  arbitrary,  non-moral,  and  irrational. 
To-day,  Religion  is  primarily  monotheistic,  or,  at  the 
worst,  monistic;  and  where  it  really  lives,  its  God  is 
personal,  and  justice  and  goodness  are  the  first  of  His 
characteristics. 

These  contrasts  are  patent,  and  certain  consequences 
follow.  We  obviously  give  a  higher  value  to-day  to 
personality;  to  the  individual;  and  religion  gains  or  suf- 
fers correspondingly.  The  strength  of  the  old  religions 
lay  in  the  fact  that  they  were  national,  and  that  is  the 
weakness  of  Hinduism  to-day.  One  might,  on  the  other 
hand,  say  that  the  strength  of  the  modern  type  of  religion 
is  that  it  is  not  national,  it  is  at  once  more  and  less  than 
national.  It  is  above  nationality;  and  in  every  case  of 
a  really  living  nation  and  a  really  vital  religion,  masses 
of  the  nation  reject,  or  misunderstand,  or  neglect  religion ; 
those  who  are  convinced  are  religious  with  an  intensity 
unknown  in  the  old  days,  while  the  rest  make  less  and 
less  pretence  of  religion.  We  cannot  have  it  both  ways. 
The  savage  emphasised  the  tribe  and  had  a  social  re- 
ligion; the  Greek  discovered  the  individual,  and  we  have 
to  put  up  with  the  consequences. 

Certain  things,  however,  stand  out  from  the  contrasts 
which  we  have  drawn.  The  emphasis  on  personality 
affects  all  our  thought  of  God  and  man ;  while  a  progres- 
sive attention  to  morality  goes  with  the  discovery  of  the 
individual,  and  involves  changes  as  fundamental  in  re- 
ligion. To  these  two  points  we  shall  have  to  return  again 
and  again. 

At  this  stage  certain  observations  have  to  be  made 
on  the  general  subject  of  the  study  of  religious  move- 
ments, historical,  primitive,  and  pre-historical. 


14  PROGRESS  IN  RELIGION 

First  of  all,  as  Andrew  Lang  emphasised,  man  is  not 
to  be  caught  in  a  primitive  state;  his  intellectual  begin- 
nings lie  very  far  behind  the  stage  of  culture  in  which 
we  find  the  lowest  known  races.8  We  are  in  a  worse 
plight  by  far  than  the  geologists  in  their  worst  difficulties. 
The  ichthyosaurus  had  his  day,  and  lay  down  and  died ; 
and  nobody  took  the  slightest  interest  in  him  till  Miss 
Arming  dug  up  the  first  discovered  of  his  tribe  at  Lyme 
Regis  a  hundred  years  ago.  Nobody  was  concerned 
through  the  centuries  to  explain  that  he  was  still  an  ich- 
thyosaurus, semper  eadem  as  it  were,  or  that  he  never 
had  been  an  ichthyosaurus  at  all.  If  another  beast  or 
bird  died  on  top  of  him,  or  under  him,  and  their  bones 
got  mixed,  they  were  not  so  very  hard  to  sort  out;  and 
I  suppose  that  what  applies  to  the  beasts  is  true  broadly 
of  the  rocks,  in  spite  of  faults  and  the  sea  and  the  vol- 
canoes. It  is  very  different  with  the  anthropologist's 
evidence.  His  fossils  are  graves  and  offering-pits  and 
sculptures — for  inscriptions  are  as  bad  as  books;  and  he 
has  to  explain  his  fossils  by  their  living  representatives, 
which  are  worse  again  than  books  or  inscriptions.  Re- 
ligion, in  particular,  in  its  earlier  history  and  for  long 
after,  is  to  be  studied  in  survivals — in  myths  and  usages 
and  beliefs.  But  words  change  their  meaning  without 
giving  those  who  use  them  any  notice — change  them  to 
fit  new  outlooks  on  the  world,  and  in  turn  affect  the  be- 
liefs expressed  in  the  words.  Rites  and  usages  are  cor- 
rected to  fit  a  theory  of  a  day — that  is  to  say,  they  are 
restored,  and  we  know  well  how  often  restoration  means 
complete  change.  Silent  adjustments,  small  misconcep- 
tions, shame,  apology — all  confuse  the  evidence.  As 
Professor  Lewis  Campbell  wittily  asked,  how  far  do  the 
practices  of  Scots  on  Hallowe'en  or  Hogmanay  illustrate 
or  explain  Scottish  religion?  They  obviously  had  some 

8  A.  Lang,  Making  of  Religion,  p.   39. 


INTRODUCTION  15 

orgin;  but  it  is  History  that  will  give  the  clue  to  it,  and 
History,  as  we  shall  soon  find,  is  a  much  more  intelligent 
witness  than  Archaeology — arrives  later  on  the  scene  and 
thinks;  and  that  always  confuses  the  evidence. 

Words  do  not  very  greatly  help  us;  and  of  words  the 
most  treacherous  are  definitions,  and  the  abstract  nouns 
associated  with  them.  I  am  constantly  impressed  with 
the  havoc  that  our  facile  definitions,  our  preconceptions, 
and  pur  abstract  nouns  make  of  our  thinking;  and  one 
large  part  of  every  student's  work  is  to  achieve  independ- 
ence of  the  definitions  and  technical  terms  of  his  teacher. 
A  classification  does  not  necessarily  advance  knowledge; 
I  find  in  King  George's  reign  that  what  I  knew  in  Queen 
Victoria's  reign  I  know  no  longer — that  I  have  no  glim- 
mering of  things  I  once  knew  to  satisfaction.  In  every 
field  of  study  it  is  the  same — we  do  not  add  to  our  facts 
by  framing  theories,  even  when  our  theories  are  defini- 
tions. I  shall  have  to  speak  a  little  later  on  of  Magic, 
and  I  have  already  burnt  my  fingers  over  it  and  fallen 
out  with  my  friends.  And  the  definition  of  Religion  is 
hardly  easier.  I  am  not  at  all  convinced  that  primitive 
man  was  stricter  about  his  definitions  than  his  descend- 
ants are.  I  am  quite  sure  that  he  did  not  draw  all  the 
inferences  he  might  have,  and  should  have,  from  what  he 
knew.  At  the  same  time,  it  is  not  safe  to  assume  that 
primitive  man  was  as  simple  and  unreflective  a  creature 
as  is  sometimes  half -suggested.  In  Pre-History — before 
what  we  can  call  History  began — how  soon  did  man  be- 
gin to  think,  to  imagine,  to  be  an  individual?  From 
that  date  confusion  began.  His  words  meant  one  thing 
to  himself,  another  to  his  stupider  son,  and  something 
quite  different  again  to  his  bright  son.  His  spiritual  ex- 
perience, the  emotions  he  felt,  the  laws  he  observed,  may 
well  have  been  simpler  than  the  inner  history  of  his  de- 
scendants, just  as  the  colour  vision  of  the  savage  fails  to 


16  PROGRESS  IN  RELIGION 

distinguish  shades  and  even  colours  in  vivid  contrast  for 
civilised  man.  But  he  was  no  fool;  and  his  drawings 
and  his  skill  in  hunting,  with  all  the  observation  and  the 
reflection  which  these  imply,  suggest  that  we  should  rate 
him  rather  by  his  progressive  descendants  than  by  the 
retarded  or  the  reactionary.  It  is  extremely  hard  to  be 
sure  what  primitive  man  meant  and  how  much  he  ex- 
pressed of  what  he  meant,  what  were  the  extra-values  of 
his  thoughts,  and  so  forth.  In  such  inquiries  neither  our 
evidence  nor  our  definitions  take  us  very  far. 

What  has  been  suggested  as  to  Pre-History  extends 
to  History.  It  is  extremely  difficult,  even  where  we 
are  dealing  with  a  race  that  keeps  records  and  statistics, 
to  get  at  the  history  of  a  religious  movement  in  its  early 
stages  and  in  its  formative  period;  still  harder  to  recap- 
ture the  impulses,  the  instincts  and  intuitions  that  lie 
behind  it  When  we  deal  with  the  causes,  it  is  generally 
the  conditions  that  we  mean;  and  the  same  conditions 
produce  no  effect  whatever  on  minds  which  seem  to  us 
quite  as  good  as  those  in  which  the  movement  began. 

Contemporaries  constantly  miss  what  matters  most, 
and  their  words  reflect  their  failure.  When  they  do 
notice  movement,  they  are  surprisingly  apt  to  misunder- 
stand it — to  put  down  as  irreligion  what  is  in  truth  the 
awakening  of  reason,  the  stirring  of  moral  feeling. 

Two  instances,  both  illustrative  of  our  general  subject, 
may  be  taken.  If  we  compare  England  in  1520,  1620, 
and  1720,  we  find  extraordinary  changes.  In  1720,  Mr. 
Lecky  estimates,  the  Catholics  were  one  in  fifty  of  the 
population.  In  1620,  whatever  the  figures,  everything 
was  ripe  for  civil  war  on  a  religious  issue  underlying  a 
political  issue.  In  1520,  to  all  appearances,  England  was 
solidly  Catholic.  The  late  Dr.  James  Gairdner's  book  on 
Lollardy  and  the  Reformation  is  a  monument  of  the  per- 
plexity that  the  study  of  mere  records  may  produce.  To 


INTRODUCTION  17 

his  reader  it  seems  that  there  was  nothing  to  effect  the 
yast  change  which  we  observe ;  or  else  that  Dr.  Gairdner 
missed  exactly  what  was  most  important  to  discover. 
For  the  change  was  swift,  drastic,  dramatic;  and  an 
explosion  rarely  occurs  where  there  are  no  explosives. 
England  must  have  been  charged  with  forces  which  es- 
caped the  record-keepers  and  the  record-searchers.  Or, 
again,  what  were  the  antecedents  of  the  monotheism  of 
the  Hebrew  prophets?  Here  history,  it  would  appear, 
has  been  re-written,  more  than  once,  by  the  ancients  them- 
selves, but  when  the  best  endeavour  has  been  made  to 
reach  the  real  state  of  things  in  Israel  before  the  rise  of 
the  great  prophets,  we  find  a  people  admittedly  not  mono- 
theistic either  by  instinct  or  reflection.  Yet  the  pro- 
phetic movement  did  capture  Israel,  and  it  had  some  ante- 
cedents— unless  here,  as  in  Dr.  Gairdner's  England,  His- 
story  makes  the  leap  that  Nature  refuses.  And  that  is 
hard  to  believe. 

Or  again,  to  take  two  outstanding  theological  terms, 
how  difficult  it  would  be  to  write  the  history  of  Sin  and 
Redemption  in  human  thought !  How  vital  these  concep- 
tions are  for  the  history  of  religion! — and  how  difficult 
to  trace  their  development  without  big  gaps  and  great 
guesses!  Here,  above  all,  the  history  of  a  single  word 
would  give  us  all  the  problems  we  could  solve.  The  term 
"holy,"  if  we  could  trace  it  through  all  its  successive  sug- 
gestions, would  be  a  tell-tale  word,  as  it  moved  from  the 
physical  and  all  but  irrational  onward  through  the  moral 
to  the  spiritual.  Probably  most  of  our  tell-tale  words 
would  be  ethical  terms,  for  even  "truth"  is  as  essentially 
ethical  as  intellectual. 

In  the  third  place,  we  must  observe  that  Progress  in 
Religion  is  apt  to  coincide  with  progress  in  social  life, 
in  arts  and  crafts,  in  political  life,  and  in  philosophy.  We 
talk  of  men  "thinking  in  compartments,"  and  there  are 


18  PROGRESS  IN  RELIGION 

those  who  so  think;  but  mankind  never  really  rests  con- 
tent with  that  habit.  The  mind  once  quickened  ranges 
in  a  new  way  over  every  aspect  of  life.  Religious  awak- 
ening means  political  regeneration,  as  we  see  in  seven- 
teenth-century England.  Political  stimulus  makes  for  in- 
dividual self-consciousness,  and  that  involves  religion. 
Crafts  develop  into  arts;  and  artists  see  things  intensely, 
and  rightly  or  wrongly  think  swiftly — seldom  quite 
wrongly;  and  whatever  meaning  they  give  to  the  word 
"religion,"  their  contribution  to  the  range  of  the  human 
spirit  requires  of  religion  that  it  too  enlarge  its  borders. 
"Whatever  widens  the  imagination,"  wrote  Lecky,  "en- 
abling it  to  realise  the  actual  experience  of  other  men, 
is  a  powerful  agent  of  ethical  advance."  * 

Life  is  the  great  iconoclast,  the  great  emancipator. 
Life  has  a  tendency  to  outgrow  Religion  in  complexity, 
and  the  question  in  every  generation  is  whether  Religion 
will  wake  up  to  the  new  problems  and  overtake  life. 
Mankind,  as  it  grows  adult,  will  not  have  old  religions; 
old  forms  it  may  keep  but  it  re-interprets  them.  Where 
re-interpretation  fails  and  the  old  forms  are  not  shaken 
off,  a  race  or  people  atrophies;  for  man  is  progressive  or 
he  is  lost ;  and  the  question  often  arises,  What  will  liber- 
ate a  race  from  its  religion  ?  In  Israel  and  in  Greece  that 
question  rose,  and  answers  drastic  enough  (as  we  shall 
see)  were  offered  by  Plato  and  Jeremiah.  Contempo- 
raries, no  doubt,  thought  them  the  enemies  of  religion; 
and  moderns,  whose  definitions  require  them  to  distin- 
guish between  religion  and  knowledge,  may  be  driven  to 
comments  as  superficial.  Yet  these  two  men  had  no  idea 
but  that  they  were  working  with  religion,  reaching  the 
heart  of  it;  and  ever  since  their  day  those  who  have 
deeply  cared  for  religion  and  felt  its  power  have  recog- 
nised the  deep  debt  they  owe  to  such  men. 

*  History  of  Morals,  vol.  i. 


INTRODUCTION  19 

We  have  not  to  forget,  however,  cases  that  look  excep- 
tional; and  here  Rome  is  the  outstanding  example.  Ro- 
man religion,  one  is  tempted  to  say,  never  kept  pace  with 
the  Roman  mind.  This  is  partly  true,  and  Rome  paid 
terribly  for  it.  But  it  is  not  all  the  truth,  for  the 
Roman  looked  elsewhere  than  to  the  dim  gods  of  his  an- 
cestors for  real  religion — to  Greece,  to  Phrygia,  and  to 
Egypt. 

Plato  and  Jeremiah  bring  us  to  our  fourth  observa- 
tion— the  immense  role  of  the  individual  in  the  Progress 
of  Religion.  One  feature,  as  we  saw,  in  this  Progress 
is  the  heightened  significance  of  the  individual ;  and  that 
discovery  is  made  by  the  individual.  All  progress  in  craft 
and  art  is  the  individual's  doing;  the  guild  and  the  caste 
are  against  him  at  first,  perhaps  for  ever.  Justice  is 
rarely  done  to  the  pioneer  on  any  side  of  life,  either  while 
he  lives  or  after.  The  significance  of  the  Jews  and  of 
the  Greeks  in  the  history  of  Religion  is  after  all  due  to 
the  intensity  of  individuality  in  their  prophets  and  think- 
ers. In  India — and  it  is  true  in  measure  elsewhere — it  is 
in  the  sects  that  the  living  forces  of  religion  are  felt,  that 
the  great  movements  begin;  and  the  sects  are  produced  by 
the  individual  minds,  and  are  far  more  dependent  on 
them  than  the  main  body  is  or  need  be.  The  real  life  of 
Islam  is  Sufi-ism.  The  real  life  of  Hinduism  is  in  the 
Bhakti  sects;  they  revolt,  they  influence  the  great  mass 
of  opinion  slowly,  and  the  dead  hand  at  last  gets  hold 
of  them,  and  they  too  grow  petrified,  but  a  contribution 
has  been  made.  It  is  much  the  same  elsewhere.  The 
rebel  starts  the  new  idea  and  forces  it  on  the  community. 
One  could  hardly  expect  a  great  organisation  to  leap 
with  swift  intuition  at  a  new  truth,  any  more  than  a  com- 
mittee to  write  English.  The  great  Classics  in  every  lan- 
guage are  written  by  individuals;  even  the  Authorised 
Version  of  the  English  Bible  has  Tyndale  behind  it. 


20  PROGRESS  IN  RELIGION 

The  feeling  that  slowly  or  swiftly  brings  the  new  cer- 
tainty is  the  individual's  endowment.  The  great  organ- 
isation stands  for  authority,  for  a  decent  consideration 
of  what  our  fathers  found  of  truth;  if  it  demands  more, 
there  are  rebels ;  and  Progress  in  Religion  again  and  again 
has  depended  on  the  rebels  making  good  their  point,  and 
on  the  old  organisation  appropriating  it  when  made. 
Great  statesmen  and  great  journalists  think  in  millions, 
and  their  generalisations  very  often  screen  life  from  them. 
The  prophet  and  the  poet  have  fewer  formulae,  fewer 
phrases,  few  dogmas ;  they  are  less  in  bondage  to  routine 
and  conventions  and  interests;  they  come  from  the  desert, 
the  slum,  the  slave  market,  and  the  house  of  pain,  where 
solitude  and  beauty,  hunger,  oppression  and  sheer  misery, 
set  them  free  from  conventions  and  goad  them  into  dis- 
covery of  the  real  and  the  spiritual.  If  they  are  canonised 
afterwards,  it  is,  as  the  brilliant  French  biographer  of 
St.  Francis  says,  "the  bitterest  irony  in  history." 

Summing  up  what  we  have  so  far  gathered,  we  shall 
agree  to  handle  our  evidence  carefully,  to  expect  gaps  in 
our  knowledge  of  origins,  to  look  for  progress  in  re- 
ligion where  the  activities  of  man's  mind  crowd  thickest 
and  most  distractingly,  and  to  keep  our  eyes  upon  solitary 
figures,  to  watch  for  the  "voice  crying  in  the  wilderness," 
the  poet  in  exile,  the  unpopular  teacher  in  agony  and 
bloody  sweat.  And  as  we  gather  our  evidence,  and  co- 
ordinate it,  and  begin  to  understand  it,  we  shall  ask  ques- 
tions about  one  religion  and  another,  to  learn  their  com- 
parative value.  Our  standard  will  be  the  standard  of 
Progress.  What  we  learn  will  modify  our  conceptions  of 
Progress,  no  doubt,  and  will  give  it  more  content.  One 
question  will  suggest  another,  and  they  will  all  be  related. 
All  our  questions  will,  in  one  form  or  another,  bear  on 
the  fundamental  issue  of  the  relations  of  Religion  and 
Truth.  But  for  clearness  we  will  put  separate  aspects 


INTRODUCTION  21 

of  that  issue  separately,  and  here  are  some  of  the  ques- 
tions we  shall  ask. 

We  shall  ask  pre-eminently  about  any  religion  a  num- 
ber of  questions  as  to  its  philosophy.  That  perhaps  is 
not  the  prevalent  fashion  of  to-day,  but  men  have  always 
intellectualised  their  religion — inevitably,  for  man  is  in- 
curably intellectual.  The  progress  in  religion  has  been 
made  at  every  stage  by  the  thinkers  more  than  by  the  mys- 
tics, and  incomparably  more  by  both  than  by  the  adher- 
ents of  the  cults.  Man  is  always  working  at  the  unseen, 
to  get  it  reduced  to  intelligible  law  and  order,  to  make  it 
more  moral,  more  spiritual,  more  rational — to  fit  it 
more  to  his  mind,  to  adjust  his  thought  in  turn  to  the 
unseen,  to  get  a  working  unity  in  his  experience  and  his 
conceptions.  There  never  is  such  a  thing  as  simple  faith ; 
it  is  always  intellectual ;  and  the  simplest  faith  is  that  for 
which  thought  has  cleared  the  issues  and  got  them  into 
order  and  perspective. 

We  shall  ask,  then,  what  a  religion  makes  of  man. 
Does  it  believe  in  him  enough?  This  is  the  individual 
again.  Is  it  abreast  of  the  best  instincts  of  man,  his 
deepest  intuitions?  (Some  religions,  as  we  shall  see,  are 
conspicuously  behind  these.)  Is  it  developing  these  in- 
stincts still  further  ?  Does  it  urge  man  to  look  beyond  the 
grave,  whither  certain  instincts  point  ?  Is  man,  "a  dream 
of  a  shadow,"  as  Pindar  said,  or  a  "heavenly  plant,"  as 
Plato  preferred?  Man's  instincts  involve  morality  too. 
How  wide,  then,  is  the  religion's  range  in  morality? 
What  does  it  make  of  sin,  of  evil  generally?  What  does 
it  say  of  pain  and  suffering?  All  these  questions  imply 
the  individual  from  the  start;  we  are  taking  our  cue  from 
the  higher  developments  of  Religion,  and  we  can  hardly 
help  doing  so.  But  sin  and  morality  imply  also  the  com- 
munity, and  one  function  of  religion  is  to  induce  the  in- 
dividual to  sacrifice  his  own  interests,  his  fancies  and 


22  PROGRESS  IN  RELIGION 

feelings — yes!  and  his  own  rights,  to  his  neighbours  and 
to  the  community.  Does  the  religion,  then,  whichever 
we  are  considering,  comprise  the  community,  and  how 
wide  is  that  community?  Are  women  reckoned  in,  and 
slaves,  and  foreigners? 

We  shall  ask,  what  a  religion  makes  of  God,  whether 
it  speaks  of  Him  in  the  singular  or  the  plural,  the  neuter 
or  the  abstract.  And  here  we  shall  find  that  progress 
more  and  more  depends  on  the  personality  of  God — that 
this  militates  against  polytheism  and  safeguards  the  per- 
sonality of  man  and  all  the  morality  bound  up  with  the 
society  of  men.  Personality  and  morality  will  be  some- 
where involved  in  all  the  questions  we  ask.  St.  Paul,  in 
a  very  remarkable  passage,  with  great  insight  traces  all 
the  corruption  and  misery  of  the  world  to  false  views  of 
God.  God's  personality  and  man's  personality  are  going 
to  stand  or  fall  together.  Does  the  religion  claim  enough 
of  God  for  man;  does  it  claim  the  utmost,  including  im- 
mortality ? 

We  shall  ask — for  our  conception  of  society  and  of 
religion  is  dynamic  rather  than  static — how  far  each  re- 
ligion is  adapted  to  meeting  changes  in  society,  knowledge 
and  thought.  Another  philosophical  question;  for  the 
answer  depends  on  how  far  the  tenets  of  the  religion  are 
avowedly  related  to  experience,  how  close  it  is  intended 
to  keep  to  truth.  Does  it  prefer  Truth — or  something 
else,  authority  or  tradition,  emotion,  archaism,  an  easy 
mind,  or  ecstasy?  And  our  question  implies  yet  another 
on  its  attitude  to  freedom.  Does  it  stand  for  "more  be- 
yond" or  for  a  closed  book — for  a  Holy  Spirit,  or  for  a 
Koran  or  Shastras?  Is  it,  in  fact,  in  day-by-day  experi- 
ence, moving  forward  to  higher  intuitions  and  their  veri- 
fication? Is  it  attentive  or  inattentive  to  art,  to  poetry, 
to  science,  to  politics,  to  ideas  generally  and  the  ceaselessly 
moving  life  of  man?  Or  is  it  afraid  of  them?  Once 


INTRODUCTION  23 

again,  we  shall  have  to  ask  what  it  makes  of  God.  Is 
God  away  behind  somewhere,  or  in  front?  Is  He  in 
touch  with  what  men  are  doing  ? 

Following  up  this  question,  we  shall  ask  at  some  point, 
is  the  religion  universal?  Does  it  carry  any  conception 
it  has  of  the  unity  of  nature  and  the  unity  of  mankind 
to  the  corollary  of  propagandism  ?  This  is  no  mean  test 
of  a  religion;  it  involves  the  sense  of  truth,  the  sense  of 
the  relevance  of  truth  to  mankind,  and  mankind's  turn 
for  truth — the  unity  of  mankind,  and  monotheism  itself 
and  the  Personality  of  God. 

Some  such  series  of  questions  seems  inevitable,  and 
when  we  have  put  them  and  have  begun  to  get  our  an- 
swers into  a  sort  of  order,  what  follows?  For  my  part 
I  find  a  certain  progress  in  the  religions,  certain  stages, 
which,  however  uncertain  their  edges,  are  themselves  dis- 
tinct and  clear.  This  is  not  out  of  the  way.  However 
many  "missing  links"  we  may  eventually  discover,  up- 
wards or  downwards  from  the  Piltdown  and  Neander- 
thal people,  Homer  and  the  Chimpanzee  have  nothing  to 
do  with  each  other.  It  is  obvious  at  a  glance  that,  a 
religion  (in  one  sense)  being  a  system  of  thought,  it  may 
very  well  be  imperfectly  thought-out;  and  in  fact  we 
may  often  find  in  the  same  mind  religious  ideas  which 
do  not  cohere,  which  do  not  belong  to  one  another  and 
never  will.  Nor  is  it  only  on  the  lower  spiritual  level 
that  we  find  this.  St.  Paul  was  able  to  hold  incomparable 
ideas ;  at  least  he  held,  or  thought  he  held,  ideas  which  we 
realise  to  have  been  incomparable ;  but  perhaps  the  expla- 
nation may  lie  in  a  distinction  between  ideas  he  held  and 
ideas  of  which,  as  he  says,  he  was  apprehended.  I  find, 
then,  three  great  stages  in  religious  thought,  and  I  find 
further  that,  distinct  as  they  are,  certain  historical  re- 
ligious systems  have  shown  and  do  show  traces  of  more 
than  one,  sometimes  of  all  three.  I  distinguish  three 


24  PROGRESS  IN  RELIGION 

great  types  of  Magic,  Morality  and  Personal  Relation. 

In  Magic  we  touch  a  term  very  difficult  to  define.  M. 
Reinach  says  simply  that  "every  primitive  ritual  is  in 
its  origin  magical" ; 5  but  then  his  definition  of  religion 
is  perhaps  even  simpler — religion  is  "a  collection  of 
scruples  which  impede  the  free  exercise  of  our  facul- 
ties." a  I  do  not  think  things  are  quite  so  simple.  Schol- 
ars differ  a  good  deal  as  to  their  definition  of  Magic.  It 
has  been  called  a  "disease  of  religion,"  but  this  is  not 
clear ;  it  seems  to  imply  that  religion  precedes  magic,  and 
that  magic  is  a  depravation  of  it.  Sometimes  religion 
does  seem  to  lapse  into  magic — and  there  magic  will  in- 
deed be  a  depravation  of  religion.  Historically,  in  a 
broader  sense  of  the  word,  there  is  ground  for  finding  in 
magic  an  ancestor  of  science,  of  political  and  social  mo- 
rality, and  certainly  of  medicine.  All  these,  and  religion 
too,  are  again  and  again  found  in  association  with  what 
we  must  call  magic — cannot  call  anything  else.  But  there 
is  a  difference,  and  some  thinkers  find  it  in  the  attitude  of 
the  man  who  uses  the  means.  If  his  main  idea  is  to  im- 
pose his  will  on  god  or  spirit  or  demon,  then  his  action 
is  considered  to  lean  to  magic.  If  his  idea  is  to  influence 
god  or  spirit  or  demon,  and,  failing  this  endeavour,  then 
to  submit — that  is  held  to  lean  to  religion. 

I  am  not  going  to  risk  a  definition  of  magic  myself, 
but  I  am  bound  to  try  to  indicate  what  I  mean  by  a  mag- 
ical type  of  religion.  The  dominant  mark  of  magic  I 
take  to  be  outclassed  thinking,  arrested  intuition,  unex- 
amined  and  unexaminable.  Here  I  am  glad  to  have  the 
support  of  Sir  J.  G.  Frazer,  who  regards  magic  as  simply 
due  to  a  misapplication  of  the  laws  of  the  association  of 
ideas.  Mr.  Marrett  says  this  is  too  intellectualistic,  and 
that  magic  must  be  studied  on  its  emotional  side.7  No 

B  Revue  des  Etudes  Grec.,  1906,  p.  344. 

6  OrphfuSj   p.  4. 

1  R.  R.  Marrett,  Threshold,    p.  29. 


INTRODUCTION  25 

doubt  unchecked,  unexamined,  emotion  has  a  great  deal 
to  do  with  magic  as  with  all  sorts  of  arrested  develop- 
ments. Arrest  seems  to  me  the  mark  of  magic;  it  is 
commonly  sterile,  it  means  no  progress ;  it  is  an  antithesis 
to  progress.  On  the  other  hand  self-criticism  is  a  mark 
of  religion  and  one  of  the  fruitfullest  of  its  characteris- 
tics. Magic  rests  at  last  on  fancy  and  is  inspired  by  fear 
— by  fear  that  paralyses  thought  and  is  never  transcended. 
Magic  leaves  men  pre-eminently  afraid  of  the  gods — too 
afraid  of  them  to  try  to  understand  them.  As  Professor 
Gwatkin  wrote :  "As  long  as  magic  is  stronger  than  sci- 
ence, the  gods  must  be  supposed  variable  and  weak  of 
will."  8  Magic,  again,  does  not  allow  enough  dignity  and 
value  to  the  human  mind,  does  not  credit  it  with  reason, 
unless  on  reason's  very  lowest  plane ;  it  condemns  man  to 
the  performance  of  dodges;  and  it  bans  the  exercise  of 
thought.  It  is  non-moral  and  non-intellectual — an  impos- 
sible combination  for  the  religion  of  any  people  progres- 
sive in  ethics  or  thought. 

I  am  perhaps  using — like  others — the  word  magic  in 
a  sense  of  my  own;  but  my  purpose  is  not  to  define  magic 
but  to  explain  what  I  mean  when  I  say  that  Religion 
has  had  a  magical  stage,  that  there  have  been  and  are 
religions  of  a  magical  type.  Whether  modern  anthropol- 
ogists approve  or  not,  I  am  at  least  erring  with  Plato, 
who,  in  the  second  book  of  the  Republic,  draws  the  dis- 
tinction which  I  am  trying  to  make.  Indeed,  I  believe 
I  got  it  from  Plato,  and  his  strong  words  in  that  book 
bring  me  naturally  to  the  second  type  of  religion  which 
I  have  named. 

Plato  insists  that  religion  is  not  the  indulgence  in  rites 
and  sacrifices,  with  an  element  of  jollification  in  them,  but 
no  discernible  moral  purpose  or  moral  effect,  no  relation 
to  conduct  or  to  principle.  "Adorn  the  soul,"  he  says, 

8  Gifford  Lectures,  vol.  i.  p.   260. 


26  PROGRESS  IN  RELIGION 

"in  her  proper  jewels — temperance,  justice,  courage  and 
nobility  and  truth.  In  these  arrayed,  the  soul  is  ready 
to  go  on  her  journey  to  the  world  below,  when  her  time 
comes."  It  will  be  seen  in  an  instant  that  this  is  a  re- 
ligion of  another  type  altogether;  it  has  no  relation  to 
feast  or  hecatomb,  to  libation  or  sacrament.  The  adorn- 
ment of  the  soul  is  the  thing,  not  the  performance  of  any 
rite  or  the  securing  of  any  charm;  there  is  nothing  phys- 
ical or  external  about  this  type  of  religion.  The  ethical 
virtues  get  all  the  emphasis — and  they  all  have  a  strong 
intellectual  element;  especially,  we  may  say,  Truth,  the 
very  last  thing  that  has  even  the  slightest  relation  with 
magic,  however  we  define  it.  Much  the  same  attitude 
was  maintained  by  the  greater  prophets  of  Israel  toward 
the  religion  of  sacrifice — it  had  no  relation  to  righteous- 
ness and  therefore  could  be  of  no  interest  to  Jehovah. 
In  emphasising  the  reference  to  a  personal  god,  they 
struck  a  very  different  note  from  Plato's:  but  with  him 
they  represent  that  type  of  religion  of  which  the  essence 
is  morality.  The  stories  will,  in  the  pages  that  follow, 
afford  the  most  striking  example  of  this  type — a  fact 
that  reminds  us  of  its  chief  weakness.  To  religions  of 
this  group  a  personal  god  is  not  necessary,  or  may  be  ir- 
relevant; but  they  find  it  hard  to  carry  mankind  with 
them  to  this  point. 

The  religions  of  the  third  type  are  the  most  interest- 
ing, and  for  Western  thinkers  St.  Paul  is  the  outstand- 
ing example.  He  devoted  himself  to  religion  of  the  sec- 
ond type  and  gave  himself  in  earnest  to  the  achievement 
of  morality ;  but  as  his  insight  deepened,  he  realised  that 
he  was  engaged  upon  an  impossible  task ;  he  made  a  great 
change  and  became  content  "not  to  have  his  own  right- 
eousness," to  accept  rather  than  earn,  and  to  live  a  life 
dependent  upon  Grace.  Though  he  is  the  outstanding 
instance  of  this  type,  and  became  normative  for  Chris- 


INTRODUCTION  27 

tianity,  the  type  is  not  only  found  in  Christian  thought. 
As  I  understand  it,  all  the  schools  of  thought  in  India 
which  emphasise  Bhakti  belong  in  degree  to  this  class. 
The  anhangs  of  Tuka  Ram,  the  Maratha  poet  of  the 
seventeenth  century — I  only  know  them  in  English  but 
the  verse  renderings  of  some  of  them,  if  surreptitiously 
printed  with  Cowper's  versions  of  Mme.  Guyon,  might 
pass  without  remark.  The  "Cat-Theology"  of  the  Ten- 
galai  followers  of  Ramanuja  in  contrast  with  the  "Mon-« 
key-Theology"  of  their  rivals  seems  to  be  of  the  same 
type.9  The  cat  herself  carries  her  kitten;  the  baby  mon- 
key has  to  hold  on  underneath  its  mother  as  she  leaps 
about;  which  is  the  picture  of  the  soul's  relation  with 
God  ?  Those  who  decide  for  the  cat  stand  for  something 
very  like  divine  grace.  Distinctions  spring  up  when  we 
ask  what  it  is  hoped  that  divine  grace  will  effect;  and 
we  realise  that  Tuka  Ram  and  Mme.  Guyon  have  very 
different  hopes.  Mme.  Guyon  looks  for  salvation  from 
sin,  Tuka  from  re-birth.  I  surmise  that  the  Shinshu  sect 
in  Japanese  Buddhism  shows  some  affinity  with  this  type 
of  religion.  One  part  of  our  task  will  be  to  observe  how, 
both  in  the  Hebrew  and  the  Greek  world,  men  kept  mov- 
ing to  the  conception  of  real  relations  between  God  and 
man,  even  at  the  cost  of  losing  something  in  morality  and 
of  dropping  back  into  magic. 

But  to  sum  up,  and  to  reach  a  conclusion.  My  thesis 
is  that  a  progress  is  to  be  observed  in  men's  conceptions 
of  Religion.  We  shall  look  to  find  it  in  the  development 
of  their  sense  of  the  value  of  the  individual  man,  both 
as  an  agent  and  as  a  passive  member  of  society,  in  virtue 
of  his  personality;  and  in  connection  with  this,  we  shall 
find  a  progress  in  men's  ideas  of  conduct  both  as  regards 
the  individual  and  society;  their  conduct  will  depend  on 
their  estimate  of  personality,  and  that,  as  already  sug- 

8  Cf.  Nicol   Macnicol,  Indian   Theism. 


28  PROGRESS  IN  RELIGION 

gested,  on  their  sense  of  personality  in  their  God.  All 
his  relations  with  men  will  be  interpreted  in  the  light 
of  his  personality  and  its  bearing  upon  the  personalities 
of  men.  The  impulse  to  conceive  in  this  way  of  the  re- 
lations of  God  and  man,  we  shall  find,  came  partly  along 
the  lines  of  men's  experience  of  common  life  and  their 
slow  discovery  of  the  value  and  beauty  of  moral  law, 
partly  along  the  lines  of  reflection  upon  God.  We  shall 
find  a  steady  drive  to  a  morality  that  is  ever  higher,  and 
a  drive,  as  steady,  toward  monotheism,  while  religion 
ever  claims  more  and  more  of  life.  We  shall  find  that 
the  soul  refuses  to  be  satisfied  on  any  level  but  the  very 
highest,  and  that,  as  a  German  thinker  has  said,  "man  is 
for  nothing  so  grateful  as  for  the  advancement  of  his 
spiritual  life."  We  shall  find  that  man  has  a  firm  be- 
lief that  nothing  but  the  truth  will  help  him,  and  an  un- 
dying faith  that  he  will  find  truth  or  that  it  will  be  re- 
vealed to  him ;  and,  in  the  end,  that  he  and  God  stand  face 
to  face  for  eternity  and  can  adjust  their  relations  on  no 
basis  less  than  ultimate  and  perfect  righteousness. 


II 

EARLY  MAN  AND  HIS  ENVIRONMENT 

To  understand  a  man,  an  epoch,  or  a  period,  some 
familiarity  with  antecedents  is  always  inevitable.  Our 
present  task  will  be  impossible  without  some  general 
view  of  man's  progress  in  religious  thought  in  the  long 
period  of  his  history,  which  in  the  West  ends  with  the 
poems  of  Homer  and  the  beginning  of  what  we  can  def- 
initely call  Greek  literature.  A  general  view  of  man's 
progress — not  a  history  of  human  thought — in  a  score  of 
pages  is  an  undertaking  formidable  enough.  It  will  be 
something  like  a  resume  of  a  fifteen-hour  journey  in  a 
half  column  of  Bradshaw,  with  this  drawback  that,  while 
Kettering,  Leeds  and  Carlisle  do  convey  very  definite 
ideas  to  the  mind,  our  stages  will  be  more  like  the  stations 
in  the  Delta  of  the  Ganges,  halting-places  in  the  open 
with  only  this  to  recommend  them,  that  for  the  moment 
they  are  out  of  the  water.  A  progress  is  discernible;  its 
history,  especially  its  earliest  history,  is  too  often  con- 
jectural. The  main  thing  is  plain  enough — it  is  the  story 
of  long  and  steady  application  of  intelligence,  observa- 
tion and  reason  to  Religion,  and  its  slow  but  remarkable 
transformation  in  the  process. 

Here  and  there  there  must  be  allusions  to  "primitive 
man,"  of  whom  I  have  this  to  say  at  once.  The  fact 
that  some  descendants  of  primitive  men  have  achieved 
civilisation  and  clear  thinking  while  others  have  remained 
savage  or  become  savage,  and  are  content  with  the  min- 
imum of  thought,  suggests  that  primitive  man  was  not  a 
fixed  type,  and  that  the  name  should  perhaps  not  be  used, 

29 


30  PROGRESS  IN  RELIGION 

without  caution,  as  a  constant  term.  We  cannot  put  all 
the  differences  down  to  Geography;  the  Turk  has  lived 
for  centuries  among  the  same  scenes  that  Homer  and 
his  heroes  knew,  and  among  civilised  neighbours,  and  is 
still  a  barbarian ;  and  it  is  not  all  due  to  his  religion,  for 
the  Persian  also  is  Moslem.  Why  race  differs  from  race 
is  a  secret  not  yet  wrung  from  Nature.  Primitive  races 
do  some  things  very  much  in  the  same  way ;  and  the  evo- 
lution of  tools  and  weapons  can,  down  to  a  certain  point, 
be  made  out  by  laying  together  the  remains  of  different 
peoples  who  may  be  very  widely  removed  from  each 
other;  they  fill  one  another's  gaps,  till  at  last  a  common 
progression  in  parallel  can  be  made  out.1  Parallels,  in 
like  manner,  with  limitations  already  considered,  are  to 
be  traced  in  the  religious  ideas  of  men;  and  perhaps  their 
development  followed  similar  courses.  Perhaps;  but 
some  things  are  done  in  very  different  ways  by  different 
races;  and  in  this  sphere — perhaps  even  for  ages  before 
the  dawn  of  history — the  individual  counts  more  than  we 
are  apt  to  allow.  How  early  did  man  begin  to  notice  his 
environment  and  to  explain  it?  How  soon  did  he  begin 
to  be  subject  to  trance,  to  hysterics,  to  low  spirits  ?  "Bless- 
ings on  the  man  who  invented  sleep!"  says  Sancho 
Panza ;  and  who  invented  the  strange  habits  of  the  mind 
that  follow  hunger  and  disease,  or  result  from  the  use 
of  fruits  and  fluids  that  have  fermented? 

We  shall  have  to  look  at  some  of  those  strange  things 
in  Nature,  in  which  man  is  apt  to  surmise  that  there  are 
feelings  and  a  mind  like  his  own — strange  things  which 
surprise  him  with  their  ordered  ways  and  their  apparent 
preference  for  law — strange  things  which  appear  to  re- 
fuse the  very  notion  of  law.  We  shall  then  have  to  con- 
sider, in  outline  only,  man's  habit  of  explaining  to  him- 
self what  he  has  observed,  of  interpreting  it,  of  getting 

1  Cf.  Pitt  Rivers,  Evolution  of  Culture,  pp.   102,  142,  and  plate  xii. 


EARLY  MAN  AND  HIS  ENVIRONMENT     31 

it  intelligible  and  orderly.  We  shall  have  to  leave  a  num- 
ber of  ragged  edges;  "primitive  man"  had  the  same  dif- 
ficulty; but,  as  we  study  him  and  his  ways,  we  find  a 
confirmation  of  Carlyle's  sayings :  "Is  not  all  work  of  man. 
in  this  world  a  making  of  Order?  .  .  .  We  are  all  born 
enemies  of  Disorder."  An  unwritten  chapter  of  Heroes 
and  Hero  Worship  would  be  about  these  primitive  men 
who  "got  acquainted  with  realities"  and  were  "sons  of 
Order."  We  shall  not  be  able  to  write  it,  but  we  shall 
come  on  the  tracks  of  some  very  genuine  heroes.  In  the 
third  place,  we  shall  have  to  glance  at  man's  ways  of 
arranging  his  relations  with  the  strange  things  he  finds 
alive  about  him  and  credits  with  powers  beyond  his  own. 
This  will  bring  us  to  the  factors  making  for  progress  and 
to  those  which  tell  against  it;  and  then  we  must  try  to  sum 
up  what  results  we  have  reached.  If  Aristotle  pled  guilty 
to  treating  Ethics  "in  outline  and  not  with  precise  de- 
tail," another  may  ask  forgiveness,  if  under  greater  limi- 
tations he  leaves  some  things  unwritten,  and  credits  his 
fellow-students  with  memory  and  imagination. 

No  one  can  tell  where  man's  first  observation  began 
of  what  we  roughly  call  the  superhuman.  Nature  is  full 
of  strange  and  terrible  things;  quite  apart  from  tempests 
and  earthquakes,  her  common  ways  are  mysterious 
enough.  The  breeze,  the  cloud,  the  rain  are  unaccount- 
ably wayward.  Summer  and  Winter  are  more  orderly  in 
their  habits — not  that  mere  orderliness  makes  a  thing  in- 
telligible. Leaf  and  fruit  come  about  their  business  but 
make  little  noise  as  to  their  methods  and  minds.  The 
moon's  four  weeks  come  round,  and  round  again,  with 
some  sameness;  the  sun's  proceedings  take  longer  to 
make  out,  but  are  not  quite  beyond  understanding,  though 
why  these  great  lights  behave  as  they  do,  and  what  their 
relations  to  each  other,  and  what  (if  any)  to  the  stars, 
who  can  guess?  Who  could  guess  the  explanation  of 


32  PROGRESS  IN  RELIGION 

eclipses?  Turning  to  earth  again,  there  are  rivers  for 
a  man  to  puzzle  over,  and  the  sea.  There  are  the  birds 
and  the  animals — very  like  people,  with  languages  of  their 
own  and  tribal  habits  and  rules,  clever,  cunning  creatures ; 
and  there  was  no  one  to  say  dogmatically  that  they  had 
no  connection  with  men,  or  were  a  different  order.  And 
here  I  may  be  told  that  I  am  going  too  fast;  are  not  the 
very  stones  and  rocks  and  trees  living  things,  too,  with 
feelings  and  fancies  and  perhaps  uncanny  ways  of  their 
own? 

Man  lived  in  an  untracked  jungle  of  life  and  mystery. 
Arid  even  where  he  was  surest  of  himself,  surprises  were 
thickest.  Was  he  sure  of  himself?  What  was  he?  Body, 
soul  and  spirit,  we  have  been  taught  to  say.  But  that  is 
the  teaching  of  civilisation.  Which  was  he  ?  "The  wrath 
of  Achilles,"  says  Homer,  "sent  many  goodly  souls  of  he- 
roes to  Hades,  and  gave  themselves  as  a  prey  to  the  dogs 
and  to  all  the  birds."  And  Homer  comes  very  late  in 
man's  story — early  enough  in  History,  but  far  down  the 
ages.  Is  a  man's  soul  himself?  Is  it?  Can  he  be  quite 
certain  of  its  doings?  When  he  sleeps?  or  faints?  or  is 
wounded  and  the  blood  flows  ?  Is  the  blood  the  life  ?  The 
soul  and  the  life,  are  they  two,  or  one,  or  several  things? 
There  are  many  such  questions.  And  when  a  child  comes 
into  the  world,  how  has  that  come  about?  There  are 
tribes  who  reckon  the  child's  life  to  begin  with  the  quick- 
ening and  cast  about  for  some  spirit-cause,  that  fluttered 
into  the  mother  when  she  felt  the  first  stirring.  The 
many  rituals  for  "purification"  of  women  after  child- 
birth point  back  to  notions  more  primitive  than  we  some- 
times guess.  After  all,  we  are  not  so  far  ahead;  there 
are  many  things  about  life  which  we  have  not  guessed; 
and  with  all  our  cleverness  we  have  not  quite  succeeded 
in  manufacturing  it.  We  can  destroy  it  and  transmit  it, 
but  not  make  it  or  explain  it. 


EARLY  MAN  AND  HIS  ENVIRONMENT      33 

But,  waiving  all  these  pro  founder  questions,  how  was 
one  to  explain  dreams  ?  Are  the  things  you  see  in  dreams 
real?  When  you  dream  of  a  living  friend,  does  he  come 
to  your  side,  in  reality?  He?  Which  he  comes?  one 
asks  again;  and  I  have  perhaps  modernised  too  much  by 
dragging  in  our  abstract  phrase,  "in  reality."  When  you 
dream  of  the  dead?  "Ah  me!"  cries  Achilles,  waking 
from  his  dream  of  the  dead  Patroclus,  "then  there  is,  even 
in  the  halls  of  Hades,  soul  and  form,  yet  not .  .  ."  (Iliad, 
xxiii.  103).  Here  my  knowledge  of  Greek  breaks  down, 
though  I  thought  I  knew  the  words.2  How  terribly  mod- 
ern our  language  is!  how  elusive  in  truth  are  Homer's 
terms,  fyvxq,  Eidoohov,  cppiv^s  \  and  how  far  he  is 
from  anything  we  could  conceivably  call  "primitive  man"  ! 

Then  there  is  loss  of  consciousness  to  explain.  What 
has  gone,  to  leave  the  body  thus  dead  and  not  dead  ?  Has 
the  soul  played  a  trick  on  you  and  slipped  away?  And 
trance  is  stranger  still.  Stranger  those  changes  of  per- 
sonality— the  modern  phrase  again,  with  its  semi-scien- 
tific air,  cloaking  sheer  ignorance  still,  and  confusing 
the  primitive  record;  let  us  be  done  with  it  and  start 
again.  What  was  a  man  to  make  of  it  when  his  wife 
or  brother  fell  in  trance  and  a  strange  voice  spoke  from 
the  familiar  lips — spoke,  I  almost  said,  with  a  strange 
spirit — was  a  spirit  the  explanation? — spoke  (to  be  plain) 
with  an  unfamiliar  tone  of  anger  or  lustfulness,  with  a 
hint  of  frenzy  and  madness — chanted  rhythmically  of 
things  unseen  by  those  who  stood  by,  of  presences  and 
influences?  Modern  words  again,  these,  undisguisedly 
abstract  nouns;  but  what  were  the  things,  those  things, 
which  spoke  through  the  lips  of  the  unconscious  figure, 
the  changed  nature  ?  What  did  hysteria  mean  ?  or  mad- 

2  "Semblance  and  life  though  thought  is  theirs  no  more"  (Conington) ;  "A 
spirit  and  an  image,  without  life"  (Purves) ;  "Second  self,  an  image  of  the 
body,  no  intelligence,  nous  or  emotions"  (T.  D.  Seymour) ;  "A  spirit  and 
phantom  of  the  dead,  albeit  the  life  be  not  any  wise  therein"  (Lang,  Leaf 
and  Myers). 


34  PROGRESS  IN  RELIGION 

ness?  or  any  of  the  states  we  now  call  psychopathic? 
And  when  the  mood,  the  affection,  or  whatever  we  mod- 
erns call  it,  leapt  from  the  one  possessed  to  another  and 
another,  and  swept  over  a  community,  what  did  it  mean  ? 
The  modern  psychologist,  when  he  sees  such  things,  calls 
them  "primitive  traits" ; 8  he  speaks  in  a  jargon  that  we 
call  "scientific" — not  altogether  wrongly,  for  it  at  least 
sets  us  on  a  new  track  and  so  far  makes  for  knowledge. 
He  speaks  of  nervous  instability  as  a  fundamental  trait 
of  the  primitive  man;  of  his  remarkable  imitativeness, 
his  lack  of  inhibition,  and  the  extreme  plasticity  that  re- 
sults. But  the  primitive  man  himself — certainly  some 
of  his  descendants,  who  are  not  yet  scientific — had  a 
quicker  way  of  explaining  it.  A  spirit,  a  god,  a  daemon, 
something  like  that,  did  it  all.  For  primitive  man,  as 
the  same  psychologist  tells  us,  is  strong  in  perception,  but 
weak  in  the  logical  interpretation  of  what  he  perceives. 
He  has  no  large  amount  of  accurate  tradition  by  which 
to  check  his  perceptions,  and  he  fills  in  his  gaps  by  imagi- 
nation; and  what  he  imagines,  he  sees,  and  he  believes 
what  he  sees — as  any  common-sense  person  does;  and 
the  chain  of  evidence  is  complete — and  wrong;  but  it 
holds  with  terrible  strength,  holds  for  centuries.  Now 
add  mesmerism  and  all  the  varieties  of  suggestion  that 
work  on  the  "suggestible,"  particularly  when  reason 
checks  things  so  slowly;  and  grasp,  if  you  can,  how  much 
in  every  initiation,  in  every  mystery,  in  every  sacrament, 
is  "suggested,"  and  we  shall  realise  that  primitive  man 
had  a  good  many  things  to  explain;  and  here  again  the 
quick  way  was  to  imagine  the  intervention  of  a  spirit. 
And  then  add  prophecy  and  second-sight  and  mind-read- 
ing and  thought-transference,  remembering  the  cases  in 
which  prophecies  do  come  true,  and  the  cases  in  which  the 
very  making  of  them  gets  them  fulfilled ;  and  again  you 

3  Davenport,  Primitive  Traits  in  Religious  Revivals,  p.  18. 


EARLY  MAN  AND  HIS  ENVIRONMENT      35 

touch  a  world  of  wonder  and  things  promptly  classed  as 
superhuman. 

In  modern  times  we  have  a  good  deal  of  evidence  of 
the  association  of  these  strange  activities  and  passivities 
of  the  mind  with  religiqn,  particularly  with  new  move- 
ments— with  revivals  in  the  United  States,  with  the  de- 
velopment of  pilgrimage  centres  in  France.  The  Greek 
poets  made  much  of  the  strange  experiences  of  the  Bac- 
chanals,4 which  I  used  not  to  believe,  but  which  I  now 
see  to  be  confirmed  or  confirmable  by  modern  observation, 
to  be  not  out  of  the  way  but  normal  for  the  region  of 
experience  concerned.  The  Hebrews  recorded  of  their 
Nebiim  acts  and  states,  which  the  traveller  to-day  can  see 
in  the  Dervishes  of  the  modern  Semites  in  a  religion  de- 
scended from  that  of  the  Hebrews.5  It  is  not  an  extrava- 
gant use  of  hypothesis  to  suppose  that  primitive  man  saw 
and  did  the  same  sort  of  thing  as  his  descendant,  white, 
black  and  brown. 

A  great  step  forward  was  taken  when  man  really  be- 
gan to  systematise  his  ideas  of  his  ultrahuman  or  spiritual 
environment.  (Once  again  the  adjectives  are  too  modern 
or  not  modern  enough.)  It  appears  that  to  the  earliest 
thinkers  of  our  race  all  things  were  isolated  particulars; 
they  had  so  little  notion  of  order  or  connection,  of  a 
regular  course  of  nature,  that  miraculous  and  non- 
miraculous  was  not  one  of  their  distinctions.6  Super- 
human and  supernatural  are  therefore  not  words  that 
we  can  well  apply  when  we  are  dealing  with  their 
thoughts.  But  however  apt  they  were  to  entangle  beast 
and  human  and  what  we  are  driven  to  call  divine  or  spir- 
itual, the  mind  of  man  makes  for  order  and  coherence; 
and  we  can  trace  stages  in  the  progress  of  men's  ideas. 

4  More  upon  this  in  Chap.  IV. 

6  Cf.  Chap.   V.  p.    125,  and  the  reference  there  given  to   D.   B.  Macdonald, 
Aspects  of  Islam. 

8  E.   Caird,  Evolution  of  Religion,  i.   306,  307. 


36  PROGRESS  IN  RELIGION 

For  fifty  years  the  term  Animism  has  been  used  to  de- 
scribe the  earliest  of  these  stages,  but  Mr.  Marrett  has 
of  late  suggested  that  there  was  one  still  earlier,  which 
he  calls  (not  very  gracefully)  Animatism — a  stage  when 
a  rock,  a  boulder,  a  meteorite,  any  oddly-shaped  stone, 
might  be  credited  with  vague  but  dreadful  attributes  of 
power; 7  before  the  spiritual  was,  in  homely  phrase, 
sorted  out,  and  the  rock  or  meteorite  from  being  animate 
became  merely  the  home  of  something  animate.  Then 
follows  the  animistic  stage,  when  all  things,  or  nearly 
all,  are  credited  with  soul  or  something  like  it,  something 
vague  but  potent,  and  divisible;  for  the  hair  of  the  ani- 
mal, the  nail  of  the  man,  the  rag  a  man  has  worn,  the 
water  he  has  washed  in,  the  remnant  of  his  dinner,8  even 
his  shadow,9  carry  something  of  his  soul  with  them.  In 
many  parts,  even  of  Europe,  there  survive  superstitions 
which  derive  directly  and  not  so  distantly  from  such 
beliefs.  The  whole  world  is  infested  with  spirits,  erratic, 
incalculable  and  terrible;  and  among  them  are  the  souls 
of  the  dead.  A  man's  soul  may,  as  we  have  seen,  play 
tricks  upon  him  even  while  he  lives;  how  much  more 
upon  his  kin  when  he  is  gone?  And  the  mystery  of  death 
takes  away  the  familiarity  and  the  friendship.  He1  was  a 
friend ;  but  what  guarantee  is  there  in  that,  that  his  soul 
will  be  a  friend? 

Ariimism  is  by  no  means  dead  yet;  there  are  tribes 
and  races  the  whole  of  whose  outlook  on  the  unseen — 
soul,  god,  nature — is  best  classed  under  this  convenient 
name.  But  progress  can  be  seen  in  the  movement  of 
men's  minds  in  several  directions;  though  this  is  not  to 

TR.    R.    Marrett,    Threshold,   p.    18;    cf.    Sir    Bampfylde    Fuller,    Studies   of 
Indian  life  and  Sentiment,  p.   99,  on  the  ammonite  fossil  as  a  god  in  India. 

8  Cf.   F.  E.  Maning,   Old  New  Zealand,  p.  96. 

9  Cf.    J.    C.    Lawson,    Ancient   Greek   Religion   and   Modern    Greek    Folklore, 
p.  265.     Mr.  Lawson's  life  was  saved  by  the  rough  benevolence  of  a   stranger, 
who  dragged  him  back  and  adjured  him  to  go  to  the   other  side  of  a  trench, 
that  his  shadow  might  not   fall  across  the  foundations  and  be  built  in   among 
them. 


EARLY  MAN  AND  HIS  ENVIRONMENT      37 

deny  that  the  paths  of  thought  cross  one  another  a 
good  deal  and  sometimes  run  together  for  long  dis- 
tances. 

We  can  recognise  the  development  of  great  spirits  or 
daemons,  who  acquire  or  have  assigned  to  them  control 
over  great  departments  of  life — itself  a  step  towards  or- 
der. Who  or  what  these  spirits  are,  and  the  degree  to 
which  they  assume  personality,  are  questions  the  answers 
to  which  depend  on  many  different  factors.  There  are 
daemons  in  charge  of  vegetation — or  associated  with  it — 
many  of  them ;  and  their  stories  vary.  And  now  we  have 
struck  a  great  factor  in  our  survey  of  Progress  in  Re- 
ligion— the  myth;  but  it  must  wait  a  little.  For  the 
moment,  we  must  note  that  behind  the  great  Demeter  of 
Eleusis  so  human  and  so  full  of  sorrow  and  graciousness 
— behind  the  less  attractive  Cybele  in  Phrygia — behind 
Isis — and  all  the  differentiated  gods  and  goddesses  of 
fertility — lie  daemons,  mere  spirits,  of  whom,  to  begin, 
little  can  be  predicated.  When  my  motor-bus  crossed 
the  frontier  into  Travancore,  a  little  way  beyond  the  cus- 
tom-house, it  pulled  up  at  a  temple  of  some  sort,  and  a 
priest  begged  of  us.  "The  temple,"  said  an  old  Brahmin 
who  had  been  befriending  me,  "is  being  restored  by  pub- 
lic subscription."  "And  what,"  said  I,  "is  the  name  of 
the  goddess?"  "She  has  no  name;  she  is  known  as  the 
goddess  at  Mukandal."  She  belongs  to  a  very  large  fam- 
ily, none  of  whom  have  names,  but  many  of  whom  fill 
a  large  sphere  without  a  name.  Those  scholars  who 
hold  by  "collective  emotion"  are  apt  to  find  in  it  the 
origin  of  some  of  these  vague  powers  and  (one  is  tempted 
to  say)  to  look  on  them  as  the  real  old  aristocracy  of  all 
our  pantheons.  Palestine  in  early  days  knew  many  of 
them,  and  called  them  vaguely  Baals,  lords.  They  lack 
character  and  personality,  and  when  they  begin  to  acquire 
myths,  it  is  a  sign  that  they  are  passing  out  of  this  class. 


38  PROGRESS  IN  RELIGION 

They  have  not — it  is  hard  to  see  how  they  could  have — • 
any  very  clear  relation  to  morality. 

If  the  paths  were  not  so  interlaced,  one  might  say  that 
from  here  the  road  divides.  In  some  lands  these  old 
vague  great  powers  remain  predominant;  in  others  they 
are  dimly  felt  to  be  in  the  background  behind  younger 
and  brighter  figures.  But  from  here  the  paths  seem  to 
divide.  Some  of  these  powers  are  associated  with  ani- 
mals— are  animals,  in  some  queer  way,  and  never  quite 
lose  traces  of  their  origins.  Sometimes,  as  with  the 
Greeks,  according  to  some  scholars,  the  god  emerges 
splendid  and  human,  and  the  beast  or  bird  sinks  into  a 
creature  merely  sacred  to  him,  and  remains  so  in  popular 
belief.  Sometimes  it  looks  as  if  the  god  started  to  become 
human,  changed  his  mind,  and  halted  halfway,  and  Anu- 
bis  keeps  the  jackal's  head  and  Ganesh,  or  Ganpati,  his 
elephant  head  and  trunk,  while  the  rest  of  them  is  hu- 
man— dreadfully  human,  as  one  sees  in  every  picture  of 
Ganesh  in  his  heaven.  The  Greeks,  as  a  rule,  had  a  very 
characteristic  distaste  for  this  sort  of  mixed  god,  though 
traces  of  it  are  found  in  Arcadia.10  Where  the  type  be- 
came established,  the  one  escape,  when  the  worshippers 
reached  a  higher,  a  more  moral  and  more  reflective  stage 
of  culture,  lay  in  some  form  of  mysticism.11  The  mystic 
theosophy  that  pervaded  the  later  paganism  of  the  Ro- 
man Empire  is  constantly  looking  to  Egypt.  Only  by 
allegory,  and  that  sometimes  desperate,  could  this  sort 
of  religion  be  brought  into  effective  connection  with  mo- 
rality. Of  totems,  like  Herodotus,  "I  do  not  speak," 
though  not  for  his  reason;  for  I  do  not  know. 

The  other  path  was  followed  by  those  who,  more  or 
less  confidently  and  completely,  humanised  their  gods — 
or  found  them  grow  human  as  they  thought  about  them. 

10  Farnell,  Greece  and  Babylon,  79. 

11  Farnell,  Inaugural,    16. 


EARLY  MAN  AND  HIS  ENVIRONMENT      39 

Whether  the  daemon  definitely  became  anthropomorphic, 
or  whether  the  god  proper  came  some  other  way,  I  do 
not  know.  Professor  Toy  says  categorically  that  "it  can- 
not be  said  that  a  daemon  has  ever  developed  into  a 
god.12  Plutarch  was  quite  as  definite  to  the  contrary; 
but  it  is  possible  that  they  are  using  words  in  different 
senses  and  not  contradicting  each  other.  Wundt  explains 
the  emergence  of  the  anthropomorphic  god  as  the  result 
of  the  fusion  of  the  "hero"  and  the  daemon,  the  "hero" 
being  a  new  creation  of  the  mental  life  of  a  later  age, 
when  human  personality  enters  into  the  very  forefront 
of  mythological  thought  and  the  value  set  on  personal 
characteristics  is  enhanced.18  The  "hero"  is  associated, 
he  says,  with  the  ancestor,  who  now  recedes.  There  isi 
some  suggestion  of  evidence  for  this  in  Mediterranean 
lands.  Homer's  brilliant  Anthropomorphism  belongs  to 
the  next  chapter,  but  while  we  think  of  his  great  Zeus, 
cloud-compeller,  lord  of  gods  and  men,  we  should  not 
forget  that  there  was  another  story.  The  Cretans  were 
always  liars,  another  poet  tells  us,  and  he  finds  their 
champion  lie  in  their  statement  that  Zeus  was  burned  in 
their  island.  Tertullian,  in  his  turn,  made  a  great  use 
of  this  in  supporting  the  thesis  he  borrowed  from  Euhe- 
meros,  that  all  the  pagan  gods  had  been  men  once — and 
what  a  pity,  he  adds,  they  chose  such  bad  men  to  deify! 14 
But  we  must  not  digress  to  Tertullian  and  his  theories 
about  the  Olympian  gods,  which  are  not  Miss  Harrison's, 
though  we  may  note  that  he  stands  in  the  great  succes- 
sion of  revolt  against  them  in  honour  of  morality. 

To  return  to  the  "hero"  for  a  moment  before  we  quite 
leave  him.  It  is  interesting  to  ask  when  the  theory  began 
to  reign  that  he  was  of  mixed  origin,  the  son  of  a  god 
by  a  mortal  woman.  We  know  it  in  Homer;  but  how 

12  C.  H.  Toy,  Introduction  to  History  of  Religions,  §  694. 

18  Wundt,   Folk  Psychology,  p.   282. 

i*  Tertullian,  Apol.   n:  Quot  tamen  potiores  viros  opud  inferos  reliquistisf 


40  PROGRESS  IN  RELIGION 

much  older  is  it  ?  The  early  Semites  believed  there  were 
marriages  of  human  and  daemon,  and,  Plutarch  tells  us, 
so  did  the  Egyptians.18  Indeed,  the  curiously  common 
explanation  of  twins  as  one  the  child  of  a  man  and  other 
of  a  spirit 16 — taken  with  all  the  legends  of  snakes,  in 
dream  and  otherwise,  in  the  pedigrees  of  special  heroes, 
and  with  the  peculiarly  naive  notions  of  some  surviving 
savages  as  to  conception — points  to  the  primitive  idea 
of  the  daemonic  origin  of  all  life.  But  here  perhaps  we 
are  digressing  again,  a  little  way.  My  defence  must  be 
that  excessive  relevance  is  no  key  to  the  primitive  mind. 

Gods,  however,  do  not  all  arise  in  the  same  way.  "The 
higher  gods  of  the  Rig  Veda,"  says  Professor  Mac- 
donnell,17  are  almost  entirely  personifications  of  natural 
phenomena,  such  as  Sun,  Dawn,  Fire,  Wind.  Excepting 
a  few  deities  surviving  from  an  older  period,  the  gods 
are,  for  the  most  part,  more  or  less  clearly  connected  with 
their  physical  foundations.  The  personifications,  being 
there  but  slightly  developed,  lack  definiteness  of  outline 
and  individuality  of  character."  These  are  gods,  I  under- 
stand, and  not  the  daemons  of  Miss  Harrison  and  Mu- 
kandal.  We  may  note  in  passing  that  scholars  who  speak 
with  authority  are  very  unanimous  in  holding  that  no 
influence  from  the  Vedas  can  be  traced  in  the  growth 
of  the  Greek  pantheon.1* 

With  the  arrival  of  gods  with  names  we  reach  the 
outskirts  of  the  higher  cultures.  The  forward  steps  are 
now  clearer — they  are  not  always  easy;  perhaps  they 
never  have  been  easy.  Miss  Harrison  is  against  us  here  ; 
she  will  not  have  us  "assume  offhand  that  the  shift  from 
nature-god  to  human-nature-god  is  necessarily  an  ad- 
vance." Yet  all  the  progressive  peoples  either  make  it, 

15  Life   of   Nunta,   4. 

16  Cf.  Rendel  Harris,  The  Cult  of  the  Heavenly  Twins,  chap.   i. 

17  Sanskrit  Literature,  p.   69. 

is  Cf.   C.    H.  Toy,   Intr.   Hist.   Relig.,   §539;   "When   the  true  gods  appear, 
the  totemic  and  individual  half-gods  disappear." 


EARLY  MAN  AND  HIS  ENVIRONMENT      41 

or,  if  conditions  are  too  hard  for  them,  they  try  to  make 
up  for  it,  by  borrowing,  by  allegory,  by  interpretation; 
and  the  old  nature-gods  have  to  change  their  character 
to  keep  pace  with  growing  intelligence.  Unless  we  are 
prepared  to  say  that  thought  is  an  evil,  we  shall  not  "as- 
sume offhand"  that  even  so  charming  a  writer  is  neces- 
sarily right  on  this  point. 

When  men  begin  to  deal  with  gods  instead  of  vague, 
impersonal,  intangible  and  really  unthinkable  daemons, 
thought  has  a  chance  to  assert  its  right  to  control  the 
whole  of  man's  life.  Blind  fear  is,  in  the  last  resort,  the 
attitude  of  man  toward  the  daemons;  the  shift  to  gods 
means  a  shift  to  thought.  With  all  man's  avowed  and 
surmised  ignorance  about  gods,  there  is  the  feeling  that 
a  god  can  be  known.  Modern  men  feel  that  a  law  of 
nature  can  be  known,  but  the  old  daemon  was  not  a  law 
of  nature,  and  his  control  of  nature  was  uncertain  and 
incalculable.  But,  with  all  the  surprises  of  personality, 
personal  gods  had  something  in  common  with  man,  and 
they  were  intelligible  so  far.  And  intelligible  things  all 
belong  to  the  same  order.  So  the  gods,  with  all  their 
differences,  can  be  grouped  and  co-ordinated  and  related 
in  some  rational  way  with  the  world;  and  this  process 
gave  rise  to  a  good  deal  of  Mythology. 

Mythology  in  itself  is  a  triumph  of  the  human  mind. 
Myths  have  been  divided  into  three  main  classes — those 
which  explain  traditional  practices  and  rituals  and  the 
holiness  of  certain  places;  and  here  we  must  remember 
that  in  every  case  the  myth  comes  from  the  usage  and 
not  the  usage  from  the  myth;  secondly,  those  which  at- 
tempt to  reduce  the  vast  congeries  of  local  and  tribal 
cults,  beliefs  and  myths,  to  order;  thirdly,  myths  that 
embody  the  beginnings  of  larger  religious  speculation.19 
This  grouping  is  frankly  logical  rather  than  historical. 

JLO  Robertson  Smith,  Early  Religion  of  Semitics,  p.  18. 


42  PROGRESS  IN  RELIGION 

If  it  is  our  object  to  reach  the  earliest  knowable  stage  of 
religion  it  will  appear  that  the  ritual  or  practice  (if  we 
can  recover  it)  will  be  our  best  evidence;  but  for  the  study 
of  Progress  in  Religion,  mythology  is  incomparably  more 
important — particularly  if  we  can  trace  its  growth.  In 
ancient  religions  myth  took  something  like  the  central 
place  that  dogma  has  in  the  religions  we  know.  It  was 
less  thought  out,  less  related  to  man's  general  experience, 
and  less  authoritative;  sometimes  alternative  myths 
would  be  offered  to  explain  the  same  ritual ;  and  the  wor- 
shipper might  accept  any  of  them,  or  none,  or  all,  pro- 
vided the  ritual  was  duly  performed.  The  primitive  god 
required  the  rite;  he  was  not  interested  in  his  worship- 
per's speculations.  To  the  modern  student  the  myth  is 
of  value,  for  it  will  generally  be  a  sincere  attempt  to  ex- 
plain something,  and  it  will  contain  implicitly  a  faithful 
picture  of  the  god  as  man  conceived  him,  and  sometimes 
of  the  first-beginnings  of  scientific  thought.  For  there 
were  all  kinds  of  myths  in  time — myths  to  explain  the 
origin  of  the  world,  of  sun  and  stars,  of  man,  of  differ- 
ing races  and  their  social  customs  and  their  genealogies. 
When  once  we  reach  civilised  man,  we  find  no  new  myths 
of  cosmogony;  the  task  of  explanation  passes  over  to  the 
philosophers.  Myth  has  the  advantages  of  being  more  or 
less  fixed  20  and  yet  subject  to  development — and  the  dis- 
advantages.21 With  time  the  myths  are  told  better  and 
better ;  there  is  more  literary  skill  and  appeal  about  them ; 
crudities  and  what  offended  the  feelings  and  morals  of 
a  later  day  were  toned  down ;  and  as  men  gained  a  clearer 
understanding  of  the  laws  of  nature  and  higher  and  more 
intellectual  conceptions  of  deity,  these  gains  were  reflected 
in  the  tone  of  the  myths.  None  the  less,  for  those  who 

20  Cinderella  sticks  to  glass  slippers;  Orestes  goes  barefoot  and  his  footprint 
is  recognised  from  its  likeness  to  the  family  footprint;  see  Verrall,  Choephoroi, 
p.   Iv.      Similarly  with  stories  of  the  gods. 

21  See  C.  H.  Toy,  Intr.  Hist.  Relig.,  chap.  viii.  §§  819  ff- 


EARLY  MAN  AND  HIS  ENVIRONMENT     43 

did  not  share  these  deeper  views,  who  preferred  a  tale 
as  it  was  told  to  them,  the  rude  features  of  the  old  tale 
remain,  and  are  inherited  long  after  they  have  ceased  to 
be  anything  but  a  drawback  to  thought  and  progress — an 
heirloom  of  reaction  and  even  of  pollution.  One  class  of 
myth  we  must  not  forget — the  myths  of  the  world  be- 
yond; for,  while  perhaps  not  the  oldest  of  myths,  they 
were  eventually  associated  in  men's  thoughts  with  specu- 
lations upon  sin  and  righteousness  and  judgment,  of  the 
utmost  consequence  to  human  progress. 

With  order  as  an  instinct,  and  myth  as  a  convenient 
tool,  man  began  to  group  and  arrange  his  gods,  a  process 
a  good  deal  easier  than  his  next  task — as  we  shall  see 
when  we  reach  Homer,  perhaps  sooner.  For  his  methods 
were  simple;  story  is  added  to  story,  for  many  stories 
may  be  told  in  many  places  of  the  same  god;  in  them  god 
is  equated  with  god,  and  there  emerges  a  god  with  a  num- 
ber of  names,  some  to  fall  into  the  background  and  to  be 
of  only  local  interest,  some  to  coalesce  into  a  single  ex- 
pression. Phoebus  Apollo  is  one  person  and  one  name — 
not  two;  but  Smintheus  is  a  little  out  of  the  way,  though 
still  Apollo. 

It  was  when  morals  began  to  take  more  and  more  pre- 
dominance in  the  thoughts  of  men  that  the  trouble  began 
to  be  serious  about  the  gods  and  their  characters.  The 
accumulation  of  myths  had  gone  on  without  much  refer- 
ence to  their  moral  implication.  Man  was  more  con- 
cerned to  unify  Phoebus  Apollo  than  to  moralise  him;  but 
when  this  later  and  more  serious  task  had  to  be  under- 
taken, there  were  all  the  myths  to  be  dealt  with — some 
were  toned  down  already,  some  half-moralised,  and  some 
remained  utterly  unmanageable.  They  lived  on  and  on, 
and  re-emerged  again  and  again,  and  always  for  mischief. 
The  most  desperate  attempts  were  made  to  allegorise 
them;  but  in  the  end  there  was  no  remedy  for  them,  the 


44  PROGRESS  IN  RELIGION 

gods  they  dealt  with  had  to  be  thrown  over.  Intellect 
and  moral  sense  made  Anthropomorphism  inevitable;  it 
was  a  next  step  forward,  the  more  significant  because  the 
next  step  had  as  inevitably  to  be  taken.  It  made  for 
clearer  thought  and  thus  was  an  impossible  resting-place. 
It  implied  the  application  of  moral  standards  as  man 
knows  them  to  the  gods;  and  the  moralisation  of  the 
pantheon  was  the  great  battleground  of  ancient  thought. 

There  was  only  one  end  to  the  struggle.  The  old  myths 
and  the  old  gods  stood  together,  and  both  had  to  go. 
There  was  nothing  possible  but  monotheism  of  some  kind 
or  other;  men  were  forced  into  it,  sometimes  by  the  in- 
stinct for  unification,  sometimes  by  the  passion  for 
morality.  And  monotheism  is  unlike  other  forms  of  be- 
lief; it  is  intolerant,  earnest  to  fierceness.22  Plato,  the 
Hebrew  prophets,  the  Christian,  the  Moslem — they  are 
all  fierce.  They  are  fighting  a  battle  for  God  and  for 
mankind,  and  they  see  that  there  is  nothing  so  fatal,  so 
damning  for  men,  as  false  thought  about  God.  Love  of 
men,  love  of  morality,  love  of  truth,  and  eventually  love 
of  God,  give  a  force  and  a  passion  to  all  their  work,  an 
edge  to  their  thought  and  speech,  and  edge  sometimes  to 
their  temper.  Why  is  man  always  re-modelling  his  con- 
ceptions of  God  ?  What  drives  him  to  it  ? 

Before  we  embark  on  any  answers  to  this  great  ques- 
tion, something  must  be  attempted  as  to  man's  ways  of 
relating  himself  to  the  spirits  or  gods  whom  he  conceives 
to  surround  him.  Our  attempts  will  for  the  present 
chiefly  take  the  form  of  questions.  First  of  all,  how 
many  different  ranges  of  ideas  are  covered  in  man's 
various  endeavours  to  make  some  accommodation,  some 
working  arrangement,  with  the  spirits,  daemons  or  gods, 
with  which  he  has  to  do?  Obviously  every  type  of  idea 
that  he  has  formed  of  these  beings  will  be  reflected  in  his 

22  Cf.  E.  Caird,  Evolution  of  Religion,  ii.  17. 


EARLY  MAN  AND  HIS  ENVIRONMENT      45 

cult,  and  a  good  many  that  other  people  have  formed  will 
also  be  included,  for  the  sake  of  safety.  Even  ideas 
which  intellectually  he  despises  will  influence  him  when  a 
sudden  call  means  instant  action.  Some  of  his  doings  we 
shall  only  be  able  to  class  with  Magic;  some  have  their 
origin  in  moral  ideas;  and  last  of  all  (as  Paul  saw) 
comes  the  spiritual  as  a  factor  in  worship.  Minnehaha,23 
the  wife  of  Hiawatha,  in  Longfellow's  poem,  goes  through 
elaborate  ceremonies  in  the  planting  of  Mondamin  to 
assure  a  good  crop  of  maize.  A  similar  motive  and  a 
similar  ritual  lie  among  the  origins  of  the  Mysteries  of 
Eleusis.  Magic  or  religion  ?  We  cannot  go  back  to  that 
question;  even  if  it  could  ever  be  answered  categorically 
one  way  or  the  other,  it  is  not  supremely  relevant  to  our 
inquiry;  origins  are  not  of  first  importance  for  us.  We 
shall  see  in  the  story  of  Israel  how  moral  ideas  became 
associated  with  ritual,  till  the  idea  of  sacrifice  dom- 
inated all  others,  with  a  constant  succession  of  developed 
meanings. 

A  further  series  of  questions,  and  these  of  importance, 
will  turn  upon  who  does  the  sacrifice  and  performs  the 
ceremony  and  on  behalf  of  whom?  And  here,  wherever 
we  can,  we  ought  to  date  the  conceptions  which  we  find  to 
prevail.  Is  the  sacrifice  a  tribal  act?  Does  the  chief, 
king  or  priest  (the  titles  and  functions  overlap)  who 
performs  it,  do  it  on  behalf  of  the  tribe,  the  community 
or  city,  or  on  his  own  account?  Robertson  Smith  in  his 
great  book,  The  Early  Religion  of  the  Semites,  suggested 
that  sacrifice  antedates  historically  the  rise  of  private 
property.24  This  means  that  certain  values  found  later 
on  in  Jewish  and  other  sacrifice  do  not  concern  us  when 
we  are  dealing  with  origins.  The  sacrifice  done  on  be- 

23  Her   name,   a   Dakotah   has  told   me,   does  not  mean   ''Laughing  Water," 
but   "Waterfall";    the   difference   is  made   by  the   first   H,    which   is   really   a 
guttural. 

24  Early  Religion  of  Semites,  p.  385. 


46  PROGRESS  IN  RELIGION 

half  of  a  primitive  tribe  will  probably  not  be  the  outcome 
of  moral,  and  still  less  of  spiritual,  motives.  It  will  be 
a  practical  transaction,  an  affair  of  Magic,  or  of  that  un- 
differentiated  Magic-cwm-Religion,  which  we  find  before 
they  become  distinct  spheres.  As  long  as  the  tribe  or 
community,  collectively  (whatever  the  agent,  king  or 
priest)  manages  its  relations  with  the  spirits  or  gods,  the 
answer  to  our  next  question  will  be  fairly  easy.  Of  what 
character  will  the  ritual  be?  It  will  be  what  the  Greeks 
called  dromcna,  doings,  things  done  in  a  prescribed  and 
traditional  way,  where  the  detail  of  procedure  is  all-im- 
portant and  the  spirit  of  the  proceedings  is  negligible. 
When  the  individual  begins  to  sacrifice  for  himself  or 
for  his  family,  changes  follow.  He  comes  in  with  his 
individual  ideas,  fears  and  hopes;  and  even  if  he  prays 
for  the  community,  he  is  acting  on  his  own  account,  he 
has  his  own  motives,  and  he  plays  for  his  own  hand. 
Both  types  of  religion,  tribal  and  individual,  exist  to- 
gether ;  there  is  no  very  obvious  incompatibility ;  the  indi- 
vidual's action  can  hardly  hurt  the  community.  Once 
again  we  note,  as  so  often,  the  appearance  of  the  individ- 
ual with  his  emphasis,  conscious  or  unconscious,  upon 
himself,  as  one  of  the  great  factors  in  the  transformation 
of  religion. 

Two  chief  types  of  sacrifice  are  recognised  by  modern 
investigators — not  incompatible,  but  distinct  and  spring- 
ing from  different  conceptions — the  communion  type  and 
the  piacular  type;  and  I  think  the  former  is  the  older. 
Here,  first  the  tribe — later,  no  doubt,  as  we  shall  see,  the 
individual — seeks  some  sort  of  union  or  communication 
with  the  spirit  or  god ;  the  tribe  is  perhaps,  as  Robertson 
Smith  suggested,  seeking  to  humour  its  spiritual  pro- 
tector, or  even  to  reconcile  him;  they  give  him  the  blood 
of  the  victim  if  they  are  Semites,  or  burn  certain  parts 
of  the  body  if  they  are  Greeks,  and  in  either  case  they 


EARLY  MAN  AND  HIS  ENVIRONMENT     47 

eat  the  rest,  and  they  share  wine.  "The  fundamental 
idea,"  says  Robertson  Smith,25  "of  ancient  sacrifice  is 
sacramental  communion,  and  all  atoning  rites  are  ulti- 
mately to  be  regarded  as  owing  their  efficacy  to  a  com- 
munication of  divine  life  to  the  worshippers  and  to  the 
establishment  or  confirmation  of  a  living  bond  between 
them  and  their  god."  It  depends,  as  he  shows,  on  a  very 
ancient  belief  in  "the  full  kinship  of  animals  with  men" 
(p.  365;  cf.  also  p.  124).  Bound  up  with  it  was  the 
feeling  that  the  life  of  the  sacrificed  animal  reinforces 
both  divine  and  human  life.26  God  and  man  drew  near 
together  in  a  renewal  of  life  and  friendship.  This  merry 
sacrificial  feast  is  the  centre  of  ancient  religion;  and  it 
rests  on  the  belief  that  with  the  help  of  the  gods  life  can 
easily  be  made  all  right,  that  the  gods  are  easy  to  deal 
with,  content  with  themselves  and  not  exacting  with 
their  worshippers.27  In  the  Roman  Empire  this  type  of 
religion  rose  to  new  life,  and  men  made  a  practice  of 
linking  their  lives  and  souls  to  gods,  who  generally  had 
no  connection  whatever  with  their  tribes  or  races,  in 
ceremonies  the  meaning  of  which  they  could  not  explain 
and  did  not  think  worth  while  to  try  to  explain;  they 
rested  on  the  tradition  that  this  was  the  way,  and  on  the 
assurance  of  their  feelings  that  they  had  achieved  what 
they  sought — on  nothing  more  objective. 

The  other  type  has  a  gloomier  aspect.  Here  the  wor- 
shipper offered  a  gift  to  induce  the  god  to  be  friendly, 
to  get  him  to  do  something,  or  to  go  away.  The  gift  was 
a  bribe,  a  form  of  wheedling,  a  bargain.  The  view  of 
life  implied  was  a  severe  one — life  was  not  easy  at  all; 
the  gods  were  awkward,  even  irritable,  and  needed  to  be 
placated ;  questions  were  asked.  Had  the  tribe  offended  ? 
had  the  man  sinned  ?  To  the  other  type  of  sacrifice  there 

25  Early  Religion  of  Semites,  p.  439. 

26  Jevons,  Hist.  Religion,  p.  352. 

27  Cf.  Robertson  Smith,  op.  cvt.  257,  258. 


48  PROGRESS  IN  RELIGION 

properly  was  attached  no  sense  of  sin;  to  this  type  it 
emphatically  belongs.  Here,  though  the  tribe  may  be 
concerned,  we  can  see  that  the  individual  will  be  in  the 
ascendent.  On  one  side  this  type  of  religion  can  be  as- 
sociated with  very  crude  magic;  on  the  other  it  is  bound 
up  with  elemental  notions  of  morality.  The  Greeks  leant 
to  the  communion  view,  the  sacramental  conception  of 
sacrifice.  The  Hebrews  gradually  turned  to  think  of  sac- 
rifice as  sin-offering.  The  development  of  the  priest 
seems  to  belong  logically  more  closely  to  this  type. 

Both  types  are  old,  and  both  lived  long;  the  same  com- 
munity could  maintain  both.  If  it  were  suggested  that  the 
older  of  the  two  types  is  constantly  associated  with  re- 
action in  religion,  some  religiously-minded  people  might 
resent  it,  but  perhaps  without  being  able  to  give  any  clear 
account  yet  of  what  happens  between  the  soul  and  God. 
This  at  least  can  be  said,  that  the  piacular  type  emphasised 
an  attention  to  morality  which  is  not  carried  by  the  other, 
and  doing  so,  it  lent  itself  to  the  development  of  those 
conceptions  of  Sin  and  of  Conscience  which  have  above 
all  things  been  powerful  in  the  advancement  and  progress 
of  religion.  If  the  Stoics  invented  the  word  Conscience, 
they  assuredly  did  not  invent  the  thing,  as  Aeschylus  and 
Plato  bear  witness.  Darker  things  than  conscience  go  with 
the  piacular  type — terror  and  the  horrors  it  brings  with 
it — human  sacrifice,  too,  which  the  theories  of  the  an- 
cients led  them  to  suppose  older  than  animal  sacrifice, 
and  to  which  fear,  prompted  by  those  theories  (now  held 
by  many  to  be  false),  drove  them  back  in  hours  of  na- 
tional strain  and  darkness. 

For  our  own  purposes  let  us  note,  before  we  pass  on, 
how,  in  this  matter  of  sacrifice  too,  the  discovery  of  the 
individual  and  the  growing  emphasis  upon  him,  the  attri- 
bution of  very  personal  feelings  to  the  god  or  gods,  and 
the  gradual  shifting  of  interest  to  moral  issues,  all  har- 


EARLY  MAN  AND  HIS  ENVIRONMENT     49 

monise  with  what  we  discover  elsewhere  in  the  field  of 
religion. 

It  remains  to  make  a  brief  survey  of  the  factors  which 
historically  have  advanced  and  retarded  the  progress  of 
religion.  Some  have  been  touched  upon  necessarily  in 
dealing  with  other  matters.  Here,  for  the  sake  of  that 
instinct  for  order  which  primitive  man  transmitted  to  us, 
we  must  try  to  group  what  we  are  discovering;  and  I 
think  it  can  be  done  briefly. 

One  thing  stands  out  for  the  student  of  religion — 
that,  in  spite  of  our  casual  modern  way  of  discriminating 
between  sacred  and  secular,  the  story  of  religion  is  bound 
up  with  things  that  we  might  offhand  say  had  nothing  to 
do  with  it.  And  there  we  may  begin.  Primitive  man 
was  not  always  thinking  about  the  gods,  even  if  we  do 
concede  that  he  was  never  irreligious,  as  many  of  his 
modern  descendants  are.  His  chief  battle,  as  Carlyle 
said,  was  against  hunger — a  long-drawn  war  indeed  of 
many  engagements  and  many  mishaps;  and  in  the  prose- 
cution of  it  he  too  sought  a  place  in  the  sun,  he  fought 
for  fresh  woods  and  fertile  acres  where  he  might  expand. 
Where  we  can  recapture  at  all  even  the  bare  outlines  of 
his  history,  it  is  a  long  record  of  migrations  and  wars, 
invasions,  enslavements  and  destructions.  Look  at  the 
savage  wars  of  the  Iroquois  and  Hurons,  which  the 
French  chronicled  in  Canada,  in  which  to  their  loss  they 
meddled  on  the  wrong  side.  The  Iroquois,  from  what 
is  now  New  York  State,  raided  the  Hurons  in  Quebec 
Province,  as  we  call  it,  and  with  English  guns  and  powder 
swept  them  out  and  exterminated  them — drove  the  rem- 
nant of  the  tribe  over  to  the  Lake  that  bears  their  name 
and  pursued  them  there.  But  they  did  not  kill  them  all; 
they  had  a  way  of  incorporating  lads  in  their  own  five 
tribes ;  and  the  captive  Huron  boy  grew  up  to  be  an  Iro- 
quois warrior  and  to  carry  on  the  war  against  his  own. 


50  PROGRESS  IN  RELIGION 

Much  the  same,  though  without  guns  and  French  his- 
torians, must  have  been  the  story  of  antiquity.  One  tribe 
drove  another  out  of  its  forests  and  lands,  captured  its 
daughters,  incorporated  its  sons  as  slaves  or  warriors — 
and  suffered  the  same  from  a  third.  Clans  perished,  men 
relapsed  into  brute  life,  and  sank  into  savages;  or  they 
fled  for  refuge  to  other  lands — mere  units  with  wife  or 
child.  In  any  case  there  was  endless  crossing  of  stocks 
and  of  ideas.  All  the  syncretism  of  ancient  religion  is 
not  the  work  of  the  Roman  Empire.  Hundreds  of  years 
before  Homer,  Smintheus-es  and  Phcebus-es  began  to  be 
amalgamated  with  Apollos.  The  captive  bride  taught  her 
children  not  quite  what  their  grandmother  had  taught 
their  father ;  and  the  children,  born  in  exile,  grew  up  with 
little  interest  in  the  shrines  and  holy  places  from  which 
their  fathers  had  been  driven.  But  the  holy  places  be- 
came a  concern  to  the  conquerors;  lions  perhaps  grew 
bolder  in  the  devastated  lands,  and  the  newcomers  con- 
cluded that  it  was  because  they  knew  not  the  manner  of 
the  god  of  the  land,  and  got  priests  of  the  old  stock  and 
served  the  old  Lord  of  the  land  and  with  him  the  gods 
they  had  brought.28  There  were  changes  in  men's  ideas 
of  the  gods — old  sanctions  weakened,  new  fears  preva- 
lent, confusions  of  rites  and  ceremonies,  old  priesthoods 
fused  with  new,  alien  families  kept  as  sacrificers  and  con- 
fusing familiar  and  unfamiliar  teaching.  Sometimes  one 
set  of  conceptions  will  survive  amalgamation  with  rites 
that  belong  to  another;  sometimes  the  rites  prevail;  and 
unconscious  compromise  must  have  been  universal. 

All  this  belongs  to  Pre-History;  and  when  History 
(from  which,  not  unnaturally,  our  definite  illustrations 
are  taken)  begins  to  dawn,  it  shows  us  much  the  same 
processes  at  work  in  different  ways.  Tribes  are  growing 
into  nations,  cantons  into  little  towns,  and  changing  ideas 

28  2  Kings,  xvii,  24-41. 


EARLY  MAN  AND  HIS  ENVIRONMENT     51 

mark  every  stage  of  such  growths.  Wars  are  on  a  larger 
scale,  but  their  effects  are  much  the  same — disintegration 
and  recombination;  and  the  institution  of  slavery  perpet- 
uates the  mixture  of  races.  Men  begin  to  trade  and  to 
travel — to  learn  new  crafts  and  arts.  Metallurgy  pro- 
gresses by  leaps  and  bounds,  and  makes  new  men  of  its 
craftsmen,  new  states,  and  new  theories  of  government,  as 
the  chief  sinks  into  the  ranks  of  armed  demesmen,  no 
longer  alone  possessor  of  bronze  shield  and  sword.  And 
democracy  knows  other  gods  from  the  old  clans;  or,  if 
they  are  the  same  gods,  it  knows  them  differently.  In- 
stead of  the  broken  tribe  flying  to  new  lands,  we  have 
the  ordered  colony  crossing  the  sea;  but  it  too  finds  new 
gods  and  brings  old  ones;  it  too  finds  the  old  gods  not 
quite  the  same  in  the  new  home  and  adds  something  to 
the  new  gods.  The  Assyrian  comes  down  like  a  wolf 
on  the  fold;  or  the  Lydian  slowly  conquers  the  Greek 
sea-coast  and  meddles  with  Delphi;  or  the  Afghan  sweeps 
all  over  India;  and  in  every  case  religion  shows  the  re- 
sults. India  knows  "more  than  fifty  accepted  external 
forms  of  Hinduism."  2t> 

Out  of  all  this  storm  and  stress,  confusion  of  war  and 
tribe  and  tradition,  one  person  emerges — more  secure  of 
existence  as  every  organised  form  of  thought  and  govern- 
ment collapses — the  Individual.  He  has  to  fly  for  his 
life — his  life,  not  the  tribe's  now;  he  marries  a  girl  of 
another  clan,  with  such  rites  as  they  can  manage,  and 
they  breed  their  children  inevitably  to  be  little  individuals ; 
and  then  he  shifts,  with  his  foreign  wife  and  his  half- 
breed  children,  to  a  colony  newly  settling;  he  picks  up  a 
new  trade,  perforce,  in  the  new  place,  and  it  suits  him; 
he  works  in  improvements,  and  his  boys  take  ship  and 
sell  his  wares  all  round  the  Mediterranean  and  bring  back 
wealth  and  more  foreign  women  and  new  ideas.  Without 

20  Meredith  Townsend,  Europe  and  Asia,  p.  254. 


52  PROGRESS  IN  RELIGION 

realising  what  they  are  doing,  that  family  makes  a  revo- 
lution in  thought.  They  were  cosmopolitan  before  Soc- 
rates, and  the  world  knew  hundreds  of  them.  After- 
wards they  drew  a  veil,  in  many  communities,  over  the 
mixtures  of  their  origin,  but  the  mixtures  told.  There 
were  larger  ideas  of  human  kinship;  the  Greek  grew  to 
be  Panhellenic  and  then  went  to  Egypt  and  Babylon  and 
Spain,  and  reached  some  conception  of  a  humanity  larger 
than  Hellendom.  And  it  is  all  reflected  in  speculation — • 
unity  grows  to  be  a  larger  and  larger  circle;  gods  are 
fused  more  than  ever,  interpreted  in  new  tongues  and 
domiciled  in  new  pantheons.  In  the  Greek  world  a  greater 
unity  than  any  pantheon  begins  to  be  conceived.  Nor  is 
this  all.  Law  emerges  more  and  more  in  the  cities,  and 
Justice  takes  a  larger  place  in  men's  thoughts;  then  the 
gods  must  come  under  the  reign  of  law,  for  the  cosmos 
cannot  have  a  ragged  fringe;  and  if  law  is  to  rule  the 
gods,  we  must  show  the  heavens  more  just.  All  the  while 
the  alphabet  is  working  its  miracles;  those  handy  letters, 
the  traders'  useful  device,  serve  other  ends;  books  spring 
up,  and  books  mean  modernity.  Science  and  Philosophy 
seize  their  chance,  and  things  are  said  in  books  that  make 
Olympus  look  strange  and  old ;  it  will  need  overhauling, 
and  it  gets  it. 

But  all  is  not  progress.  The  sick  child  sweeps  the 
philosopher's  family  back  into  superstition;  the  foreign 
priest  or  prophet  knows  a  new  miracle  to  cure  that  sick- 
ness, or  the  home  priest  remembers  something  done  amiss. 
So  the  old  things  must  be  kept.  The  marriage  life  of 
the  community  is  pure,  its  ideals  for  husbands  and  wives 
are  high;  but  the  goddess  belongs  to  an  old  order,  she  is 
conservative,  and  her  temple  is  a  focus  for  every  evil 
instinct,  where  impurity  is  solemnly  kept  and  maintained 
as  religion  with  priests  and  priestesses  saying,  singing 
and  doing  things  in  honour  of  the  gods  from  which  the 


EARLY  MAN  AND  HIS  ENVIRONMENT      53 

children  of  a  decent  house  will  be  screened  by  their 
mother  and  father.30  Or  a  great  disaster  impends  upon 
the  state ;  and  we  know  the  cry :  "Hang  morals !  I  want 
to  win  the  war";  and  we  have  seen  the  moral  deliquium 
it  brings.  In  Carthage  once  it  involved  a  human  sacrifice 
of  300  lads — not  slain  by  the  enemy,  but  by  the  priests 
to  induce  the  gods  to  save  the  state.  The  moral  sense 
grows  indeed,  but  still  there  is  the  haunting  fear  that  your 
fathers'  old  religion  may  be  true — that  the  gods  may  be 
unclean,  bestial,  filthy  and  cruel,  and  must  be  worshipped 
in  their  own  way.  You  with  your  moral  outlook  may  be 
all  wrong ;  who  are  you  to  claim  that  the  gods  are  morally 
ahead  of  men?  they  may  be  far  behind — and  then  where 
are  we  with  our  moral  notions?  Best  not  be  too  good 
to  invoke  the  gods  to  help  us  on  their  own  terms.  And 
the  priesthood  say  so;  and  if  you  hint  that  they  are  never 
the  intellectual  pioneers  of  the  community  and  that  they 
have  reasons  for  crying:  "Great  is  Diana  of  the  Ephe- 
sians!"  the  child  is  sick,  the  enemy  is  at  the  gates;  give 
the  gods  what  they  like — blood,  filth,  folly — and  be  moral 
after  the  war.31 

Idolatries  die  everywhere,  but  they  die  hard;  super- 
stition lives  long,  and  ceremony  outlives  even  belief  in 
the  gods  to  whom  it  is  addressed.  But  mankind  is  com- 
mitted to  morality  and  personality;  and  Truth  prevails. 

30  This  is  true  of  Corinth,   Comana  and  Madura  alike. 

81  Strabo,  c.  297,  says  everybody  thinks  women  are  leaders  in  superstition, 
and  quotes  Menander's  evidence  on  the  point. 


Ill 

HOMER 

IT  was  the  belief  of  the  Greeks  that  their  religion  owed 
a  great  deal  to  Homer  and  Hesiod.  "They  lived,  I  think," 
says  Herodotus,  "four  hundred  years  before  me,  not 
more.  It  was  they  who  made  a  Theogony  for  the  Greeks, 
and  gave  the  gods  their  added  names  *  ( fTtcovvpia? ), 
divided  among  them  their  honours  and  tneir  arts,  and 
described  their  appearances"  (ii.  53).  Modern  archaeol- 
ogists have  warned  us  that  this  is  rather  the  belief  of  an 
educated  Greek  of  the  fifth  century  B.C.  than  a  certain 
and  final  verdict  of  History.  The  nineteenth  century  laid 
bare  from  the  soil  of  Greece  and  Asia  Minor,  and  the 
early  years  of  this  century  in  Crete,  a  mass  of  evidence 
which  we  are  probably  right  in  assuming  to  have  been 
unknown  to  Herodotus  and  his  contemporaries — evidence 
the  value  of  which,  as  happens  so  often  when  we  are 
dealing  with  matters  of  religion,  we  may  not  ourselves 
estimate  aright  without  a  great  deal  of  care. 

But  our  subject  is  not  the  archaeology  of  pre-historic 
Greece,  and  we  are  not  concerned  to  set  out  with  any  de- 
tail what  the  earliest  Greeks — or  their  predecessors,  their 
forerunners,  or  even  their  fathers — believed.  Our  ques- 
tion is  one  more  interesting,  and  it  concerns  the  Greeks 
themselves.  How  did  they  come  to  get  away  from  that 
group  of  old  beliefs,  old  rituals,  superstitions  and  pre- 
conceptions, which  seem  to  be  indicated  by  the  remains 
that  the  archaeologists  discover?  Here,  as  whenever  we 
touch  the  Greeks,  it  is  with  a  certain  sense  of  relief. 

The  readers  of  Herodotus  had  little  doubt  as  to  what 

1  Patronymic  and  local  names. 

54 


HOMER  55 

or  who  the  Greeks  were.  We  know  who  and  what  Eng- 
lishmen are.  "The  Greek  race,"  says  Herodotus  (viii. 
144)  "is  of  one  blood  and  one  speech;  it  has  temples  of 
the  gods  in  common,  common  sacrifices,  and  ways  of  like 
kind."  Blood,  speech,  religion  and  culture — these,  shared, 
make  a  people,  or  a  race,  or  a  nation,  one;  he  says  noth- 
ing about  politics.  The  definition  of  a  modern  thinker 
would  be  more  difficult,  for  he  knows  a  distinction  be- 
tween a  race  and  a  nation;  he  recalls  very  well  nations 
of  very  different  racial  origins,  where  religious  differ- 
ences are  very  great,  or  look  very  great;  and  yet  he 
knows,  and  we  all  know,  more  or  less  what  we  mean 
by  English.  The  ancients  knew  what  they  meant  when 
they  said  Greek;  they  had  no  doubt  at  all  as  to  the  dif- 
ference between  Greek  and  barbarian  in  spite  of  political 
or  other  perplexity  as  to  where  the  Macedonians  were 
to -be  ranked  in  the  scale. 

We  do  not  know  very  well  who  or  what  sort  of  people 
had  the  religious  ideas  indicated  by  the  Archseological 
data.  They  were  not  Greeks,  and  yet,  in  a  sense,  they 
may  have  been;  as  Hengist  and  Horsa,  who  led  our  an- 
cestors to  Britain,  were  English,  but  not  the  eventual 
English  whom  we  know.  The  truth  is,  a  race  is  not  so 
stable  a  thing  as  for  ethnological  convenience  we  some- 
times could  wish  it  to  be ;  it  is  a  thing  constantly  in  flux, 
for  ever  developing.  We  may  set  the  Veddahs  and  the 
A'runta  aside;  we  know  nothing  of  their  history,  nor  do 
they  themselves.  In  the  civilised  world,  in  Burma  to-day, 
in  India  yesterday,  in  Asia  Minor,  Greece  and  England, 
we  know  that  race  is  always  changing  somehow.  The 
Greeks  emerge;  and  it  may  be  true — truer  at  least  than 
the  critics  of  Herodotus  sometimes  allow — that  Homer 
and  Hesiod  shaped  their  religion.  For  Homer  and  He- 
siod  did  a  great  deal  more  to  make  the  Greek  race  than 
Hengist  and  Horsa  to  make  the  English. 


56  PROGRESS  IN  RELIGION 

Homer,  then,  is  exactly  the  sort  of  witness  we  want, 
if  we  may  cross-examine  him  a  little.  He  stands  be- 
tween something  that  was  not  quite  Greece  and  something 
that  pre-eminently  was  Greece.  We  can  believe  that  he 
inherited  his  language,  and  found  a  diction  and  a  metre 
something  like  what  we  read  in  his  poems.  He  borrowed 
his  legends,  very  probably,  and  used  a  theme  or  themes 
familiar  to  his  hearers;  perhaps  he  borrowed  actual  lays 
of  a  master  or  masters.  He  found  a  civilisation  actually 
existing,  or  lingering  in  the  memories  of  tribes.  He  was 
familiar  with  that  quidquid  agunt  homines  which  is  the 
neglected  background  of  ordinary  people  and  the  raw 
material  of  great  poets.  All  this  he  found.  We  are  re- 
minded of  what  Heine  said  of  Shakespeare:  "He  bor- 
rowed all  the  plots  of  his  plays;  all  he  did  was  to  give 
them  the  spirit  (Geist)  that  made  them  live  (beseelte)." 
Homer  did  something  as  miraculous,  or  even  more  so, 
with  what  he  found.  He  took  what  he  wanted,  he  used 
it,  and  Greek  life  and  Greek  thought  began.  That  eternal 
flux  of  things  which  we  call  human  history  became  rapid 
and  momentous. 

It  is  sometimes  assumed  that  Homer  gives  us  the  cur- 
rent views  of  his  day  upon  the  gods.  But  it  has  to  be 
realised  that  a  man  of  genius,  who  gets  his  thoughts  well 
before  the  world,  neither  represents  things  as  they  are 
nor  leaves  things  as  they  are.  The  latter  we  shall  all  con- 
cede; the  fallacy  is  in  the  former.  Things  never  are  as 
they  are;  as  Heraclitus  says,  you  never  step  into  the 
same  river  twice — no,  nor  once.  The  human  mind  never 
took  a  photograph  of  a  situation;  it  is  not  rapid  enough, 
nor  stupid  enough.  There  never  was  in  religion,  there 
never  is,  a  standard  state  of  things.  Homer  does  not 
give  us,  could  not  give  us,  a  picture  of  religion  as  it  was 
in  his  day,  nor  can  any  other  great  poet  or  thinker  or 
even  artist  do  it.  It  has  to  be  remembered,  too,  that 


HOMER  57 

Homer  was  not  a  lecturer  on  Natural  Religion,  not  even 
a  Manu  or  a  Moses.  His  theme  was  not  religion,  either 
in  the  sense  where  cult  predominates  or  where  philosophy 
is  the  main  thing.  He  was  making  songs,  poems,  to  sing 
or  to  recite,  and  not  quite  like  Demodocos  in  his  Odyssey. 
He  told  of  men  and  of  human  life — of  their  attitude  to 
gods  and  to  the  unseen  as  it  bore  on  life  or  made  life, 
of  gods  as  they  came  into  the  life  of  his  heroes.  Surely 
he  could  have  given — so  little  was  he  concerned  directly 
with  gods  or  cults  or  beliefs — what  we  call  an  objective 
treatment  to  these  things;  but  it  could  not  be  done. 

A  poet's  art  rests  on  selection,  and  many  things  go 
to  make  his  habits  of  selection — the  limitations  of  his 
subject  and  of  his  audience,  their  interests  and  beliefs 
and  fears,  but  above  all  his  own  mind,  his  own  outlook 
on  life  and  humanity.  Thus  at  the  very  dawn  of  Greek 
history,  as  we  know  it,  we  find  the  most  characteristic 
Greek  thing  known  to  us — a  great  mind  handling  and 
developing  human  life.  We  have  to  ask,  then,  what 
Homer  makes  of  religion;  and  this  involves  two  types 
of  question.  What  did  he  find  ?  and  what  interested  him  ? 

What  he  found,  we  can  more  or  less  surmise  from 
the  poems  themselves,  taken  in  conjunction  with  the  data 
of  Archaeology  and  the  recorded  practices  of  later  Greeks. 
The  Archaeologists  may  be  giving  us  wrong  data,  or 
wrong  interpretations  of  them;  and  the  later  Greeks  may 
have  got  their  practices  from  neighbours  and  not  from 
ancestors.  I  do  not  press  these  suggestions,  though  it  is 
as  well  to  remember  them.  Let  us  then  assume  that  our 
teachers  in  Primitive  Religion — ambiguous  as  the  phrase 
is,  let  it  go  unchallenged  for  the  moment — are  right  in 
all  they  tell  us  about  those  forerunners  of  the  Greeks, 
about  the  fears,  the  fancies,  and  the  instincts  that  make 
the  religion  of  early  man  and  backward  man — especially 
the  latter — about  their  cults,  and  observances,  their  ta- 


58  PROGRESS  IN  RELIGION 

boos,  totems,  fetishes,  their  daemons  and  witches,  their 
god-possession  and  devil-possession,  their  ecstasy  and 
prophecy,  their  sacred  stones  and  sacred  trees,  and  all 
the  survivals  of  savagery  and  magic.  It  would  be  bold 
to  say  that  they  are  right  in  every  particular,  but  let  us 
assume  it.  What  does  Homer  make  of  it  all?  I  am 
reminded  of  what  Renan  wrote  when  he  read  Amiel's 
Journal: — "M.  Amiel  asks  what  does  M.  Renan  make 
of  sin — ehl  bienl  I  think  I  leave  it  out !"  (Je  crois  que 
je  le  supprime).2 

We  must  recall  again  that  Homer  was  not  writing  as 
an  Archaeologist — that  he  was  not  called  by  his  subject 
to  deal  with  the  antiquarian  aspects  of  Religion — that  he 
was  looking  to  a  constituency  of  laymen.  It  is  held  by 
some  critics,  who  have  at  least  a  right  to  speak,  that 
superstition  and  magic  must  have  been  more  rife  than 
we  should  conclude  from  Homer's  poems,  but  that  the 
Greek  (or  whoever  he  was  ethnically  just  then)  was  not 
apt  to  be  daemon-ridden.3  Conjectures  are  made  as  the 
cults  and  beliefs  of  the  invaders  who  appear  to  have 
reached  the  Aegean  world  from  the  North,  and  of  those 
whom  they  found  and  conquered  on  their  arrival.  Later 
Greeks  certainly  show  a  good  many  traits  in  their  re- 
ligion which  it  is  agreed  to  call  primitive.  The  great 
poet,  however,  chose  a  subject  which  did  not  involve  him 
in  these  discussions,  which  took  him  out  of  the  twilight 
into  the  open  air,  which  meant  for  him  not  guesswork 
as  to  the  unknown  but  interpretation  of  what  he  knew, 
what  he  had  suffered,  what  he  had  been — in  a  word, 

Et  quorum  pars  magna  fui. 

His  poem  is  autobiographical,   as  all  great  interpreta- 
tion is. 

2  Introduction  to  Amiel's  Journal,  Eng.  trn.,  p.   n. 

3  Cf.  T.  D.  Seymour,  Life  in  the  Homeric  Age,  392  ff.     Farnell,  Greece  and 
Babylon,  158,  178. 


HOMER  59 

Here  I  may  seem  to  be  digressing  to  Homeric  criticism, 
but  one  is  surely  allowed  to  cross-examine  a  witness,  to 
know  whether  one  is  questioning  an  individual  or  a 
chorus.  It  is  hard  to  believe  that  in  the  Homeric  poems 
we  have  not  to  do  with  a  personality  and  a  very  great 
one.  There  are  difficulties  still,  which  suggest  later 
hands.  Others  may  have  added  their  quota  to  the  work, 
differing  here  and  there  it  may  be  in  their  treatment  of 
a  character  or  an  episode,  but  the  great  original  dom- 
inated his  school,  he  selected  its  interests,  and  he  gave 
it  its  tone.  The  more  one  studies  poetry,  the  more  one 
feels  the  presence  of  a  great  nature  behind  great  poetry,4 
and  the  great  natures  gravitate  to  the  great  factors  in 
life  —  inevitably.  Homer  wrote  —  or  sang  —  or  whatever 
be  the  right  word  —  of  the  gods;  and  it  is  irresistible  that 
Homer  thought  about  the  gods.  If  my  point,  already  at- 
tempted, is  right,  even  if  he  meant  to  portray  the  gods 
exactly  as  ordinary  people  conceived  of  them,5  he  could 
not  do  it;  he  was  not  an  ordinary  person.  Euripides  is 
the  only  poet  of  genius,  known  at  all  to  me,  who  can  be 
credited  with  the  plan  of  drawing  the  gods  exactly  as 
ordinary  men  imagined  them,  and  he  did  it  for  a  pur- 
pose; his  pictures  are  individual  and  characteristic  of  him- 
self to  the  last  degree  —  the  protest  and  the  irony  cannot 
be  escaped.  But  with  Homer  we  do  not  think  of  protest 
or  irony;  his  purpose  is  other.  We  might  even  say  he 
has  no  purpose  but  the  artist's  —  to  present  men  oiovS  dtf 
iroieir*  as  they  ought  to  be  drawn,  and  gods  no  less. 

He  is  not  conscious  of  making  a  challenge,  we  gather, 
nor  does  he  expect  to  be  challenged.  Here  as  elsewhere 
he  keeps  his  own  amazing  serenity.  So  much  the  better 


*  Cf.  Longinus,  9,  2,  i 

8  As  commentators  suggest;   e.g.,   How  and  Wells  on  Herodotus  ii.   53. 

6  Sophocles  on  his  own  practice;  so  Aristotle,  Poetics,  25,  xi,  14600.  Cf. 
J.  W.  Mackail,  Lectures  on  Greek  Poetry,  p.  157,  whose  interpretation  of 
the  famous  phrase,  more  interesting  than  that  of  the  editors,  serves  my  mean- 
ing best. 


60  PROGRESS  IN  RELIGION 

a  witness  he  will  be  for  us.  But  none  the  less  he  will  be 
re-creating  what  he  interprets,  adding  something  and  de- 
veloping it. 

Homer  shows  so  many  of  the  great  Greek  character- 
istics that  there  is  much  to  be  said  for  the  view  that  the 
Hellen  had  come  to  his  own  already  in  that  day.  Homer 
has  already  the  strong  preference  for  clearness  that 
marks  the  best  minds  of  Greece — the  instinct  for  the 
fact  and,  above  all,  for  the  relevant  fact;  he  has  the 
turn  for  order  in  his  ideas  that  all  thinkers  cultivate,  and 
in  a  high  degree  the  Greek  loyalty  to  form  and  freedom 
as  equal  and  indivisible  factors  in  all  art  and  all  sound 
thinking.  In  a  word,  he  has,  without  talking  about  it, 
the  gift  of  criticism — a  natural  turn  for  "examining 
life"  (in  Plato's  phrase7).  All  these  faculties  come  in- 
stinctively and  unconsciously  into  play,  when  he  thinks 
of  the  gods;  and  with  them  another  gift  of  the  artist 
makes  itself  felt.  He  has  that  passion  for  personality, 
that  is  the  mark  of  great  creative  natures.  Aristotle* 
remarked  upon  his  way  of  letting  men  and  women  and 
others  develop  their  own  characters  in  his  story.  What 
he  loves  in  men,  he  cannot  deny  to  gods;  his  gods  are 
inevitably  personal  and  individual. 

Miss  Jane  Harrison  brings  a  fierce  indictment  against 
the  gods  of  Homer — "the  Olympians,"  as  she  names 
them  with  scorn.  The  Olympian  god  sheds  his  plant  or 
animal  form,  she  tells  us;  he  refuses  to  be  an  earth- 
daemon,  or  an  air-daemon,  or  even  a  year-daemon;  his 
"crowning  disability  and  curse"  is  that  he  claims  to  be 
immortal,  which  fixes  a  great  gulf  between  him  and  man- 
kind; he  has  personality,  individuality;  and  he  claims 
reality,  "the  rock  on  which  successive  generations  of  gods 
have  shattered."  9  To  all  these  charges — apart  from  the 

7  Apology.  38  A.     There  is  a  great  deal  more  to  be  said  for  Matthew  Arnold's 
definition  of  literature  as  a  criticism  of  life  than  some  people  allow. 

8  Poetics,  24,   7,   146  a.  9  J.  E.  Harrison,  Themis,  pp.  447-477. 


HOMER  61 

comments  interspersed  upon  them — Homer  must  plead 
guilty.  He  has  done  all  these  things — he  has  re-created 
his  gods,  rid  them  of  their  older  and  odder  forms,  and 
given  them  the  qualities  denounced.  His  gods  are  no 
longer  the  cosy,  "delightful,"  homely,  Brer  Rabbit  affairs 
of  the  twilight,  which  primitive  man  imagined  and  Miss 
Harrison  prefers. 

Two  comments  may  be  made  at  this  point,  and  then 
we  may  pass  to  a  little  more  examination  of  what  Homer 
has  done.  As  Professor  Webb  has  pointed  out,10  the 
tendency,  which  has  led  to  the  development  of  the  "Olym- 
pian," is  a  necessary  and  abiding  factor  in  religion.11 
And  further,  when  such  a  transformation  is  originated, 
or  at  least  used  and  developed,12  by  a  mind  and  nature  as 
rich  as  Homer's — when  it  is  associated  with  so  great  a 
forward  movement  in  national  consciousness,  in  life  and 
culture,  as  we  find  accompanying  the  spread  and  ascend- 
ency of  Homeric  ideas — it  will  require  some  proof  that 
the  transformation  is  not  itself  a  necessary  and  helpful 
stage  of  progress. 

The  gods  of  Homer  are  a  community  of  persons,  of 
characters  as  markedly  individual  as  the  Greek  heroes 
themselves.13  Whatever  their  origins — and  the  descrip- 
tive epithets  that  pursue  them  through  the  poems,  those 
epithets  which  Herodotus  seems  to  credit  Homer  with 
inventing,  are  commonly  taken,  as  we  have  seen,  to  be 
relics  of  older  and  less  glorious  days,14  and  indications 

10  C.  C.  J.  Webb,  Group  Theories,  17 a. 

11  Cf.  also  J.  Girard,  Le  Sentiment  Religieux  en  Grlce  d'Homlre  &  Eschyle, 
p.  42. 

12  Readers  will  recall  the  indignant  attempts  of  some  Shakespearean  scholars 
to  discredit   Coleridge's  criticism  of   Shakespeare's   subtlety  in   giving  Romeo  a 
first  love  before  Juliet,  on  the  ground  that  the  lady  was  in  the  original  story. 
The  real  point  is  that  Shakespeare  kept  her.     Whatever  may  have  been  done  in 
"Olympian! sing"  before  Homer,  he  used  certain  ideas  and  discarded  others,  and 
•we  must  ask  why. 

13  Edward    Caird,   Evolution    of  Religion,    i.    277,    suggests    that   the   marked 
outlines  are  due  to  the  poet's  effort  to  realise  and  to  picture;   popular  religion 
could  never  have  been  so  definite. 

14  It    is    hinted,    for    instance,    that    bodpis   Hera    was    not   merely    "ox-eyed" 
originally,  but  had  a  whole  cow's  head.     Glaukopis  Athena  was   originally  the 
goddess  with  the  eyes,  or  face,  or  aspects  of  an  owl;  and  she  was  represented 


62  PROGRESS  IN  RELIGION 

that  the  eventual  god  with  his  group  of  epithets,  local 
and  other,  is  a  conflation  of  a  number  of  divinities — 
whether  the  god  was  from  the  first  a  single  god  of  a 
tribe  or  a  place,  or  whether  he  is  amalgamated  out  of  a 
variety  of  predecessors,  he  is  individual,  a  person  per- 
fectly self-conscious,  and  as  thoroughly  independent  of 
his  "sources"  as  an  American  of  his  ancestors.  The  gods 
are  not  in  Homer,  what  the  Stoics  later  on  tried  to  make 
them,  personifications— one  of  grain,  another  of  wine, 
a  third  of  some  process  or  other,15 — not  at  all,  nor  are 
they  even  exactly  gods  of  this  and  of  that.  Hades,  it  is 
true,  is  god  of  the  world  below,  Poseidon  is  god  of  the 
sea,18  but  much  as  Joseph  Bonaparte  was  King  of  Spain 
and  Jerome  Bonaparte  King  of  Westphalia — because  in 
the  allotment  of  a  conquered  universe  those  kingdoms  fell 
to  them  by  lot  or  were  given  to  them  by  a  supreme 
brother.  Still  less  are  they  gods  of  places,  though  they 
have  friendly  feelings  for  certain  places  as  they  have  for 
certain  people.  It  is  suggested  that  they  have  gained 
somewhat  by  being,  like  the  heroes,  themselves  away  from 
home,  dissevered  for  purposes  of  war  from  their  ordi- 
nary business  and,  to  a  large  extent,  from  their  cults 
and  myths  as  well.  Like  the  heroes  in  the  Greek  camp, 
they  are  brought  to  a  common  level,  a  common  denomi- 
nator, to  new  relations.  They  may  have  their  favourite 
heroes,  but  they  are  all  relevant  to  all  the  combatants, 
Greek  and  Trojan. 

Here  we  have  touched  one  of  the  main  contributions 
of  Homer  to  Greek  religion.  Whether  he  had  predeces- 
sors who  pointed  the  way  we  cannot  guess.  Possibly  he 
had;  "all  art,"  it  has  been  said,  "is  collaboration."  Ob- 
servation of  the  modern  world  and  the  records  of  the 

in  art  as  an  owl  with  human  arms  or  human  head,  before  she  became  the 
anthropomorphic  goddess  with  the  bird  for  her  attribute. 

15  Conflict  of  Religions,  p.  95 ;   Cicero,  de  Nat.  Deor.   ii.   60-70. 

18  Iliad,  xv.  187  if.     He  "knew  less"  than  Zeus. 


HOMER  63 

ancient  tell  us  how  polytheists  instinctively  accept  the 
gods  of  others  and  blend  them — equate  them  with  their 
own.  But  here  at  this  early  stage  of  Greek  history,  be- 
fore even  the  term  Hellenes  was  widely  accepted  as  the 
name  of  all  Greeks,  Homer  creates  or  develops — or  so 
emphasises  and  vivifies  as  to  all  purposes  to  create — a 
Panhellenic  religion.  There  was,  and  there  remained, 
a  parochial  element  in  Greek  religion — queer  old  gods 
and  goddesses,  and  local  heroes,  survived  in  corners  down 
to  the  period  of  the  Roman  Empire;  perhaps  they  were 
there  before  Homer's  day.  But  they  did  not  contribute 
to  the  growth  of  the  Greek  consciousness.  Why  should 
an  Argive  regard  the  gods  of  Corinth,17  or  an  Attic 
peasant  of  one  deme  the  family  gods  of  the  noble  family 
of  another  deme?  Even  the  gods  concerned  would  not 
expect  it.  A  city  wanted  city  gods  as  against  gods  of  the 
clan  or  gods  of  the  canton ;  and  Greece  gained  something 
from  her  Panhellenic  gods.  Common  religion  was,  as 
we  saw,  one  of  the  strands  of  nationality  according  to 
Herodotus ;  and  this  was,  in  large  measure,  the  contribu- 
tion of  Homer.  So  much  could  a  great  poet  achieve — 
thinking  his  way  instinctively  into  human  life,  into  re- 
ligion, and  giving  beauty  to  his  interpretation  of  what 
he  found.  His  gods  never  made  one  nation  of  all  the 
Greeks,  but  every  thinking  Greek  was  influenced,  in  his 
outlook  on  the  Greek  world,  in  his  relations  with  his 
Greek  neighbours,  by  the  Panhellenic  Olympus. 

There  was  progress,  too,  in  another  quarter.18  Far 
away  on  the  horizon  are  strange  figures,  divine  and  mon- 
strous— the  Hundred-handed  "whom  the  gods  call  Briar- 
eus  but  all  men  call  him  Aegaeon"  19 — Titans  now  in 
Tartarus20 — things  or  beings  that  fought  against  Zeus 

IT  Xenophon    thought   the  Argive    should   have   regarded   Corinthian   altars, 
Hell,  iv,  2,  3. 

18  See  C.itard,  Le  Sentiment  Religieux,  bk.  i,  ch.  it. 
18  Iliad,  i.  402. 
-u  Iliad,  viii.  479. 


64  PROGRESS  IN  RELIGION 

and  fell.  The  father  of  Zeus  was  a  Titan  and  was  de- 
throned by  his  sons.  Zeus  and  his  dynasty  represent 
something  higher  and  better,  something  more  human,  one 
says  instinctively — mind  and  reason  rather  than  sheer 
brute  force.  Passion  may  influence  a  god,  like  the  hate 
of  Poseidon  for  Odysseus,  but  it  is  intelligible  anger,  it 
has  a  reason  which  any  rational  being  can  grasp,21  Po- 
seidon is  a  being  with  a  mind,  with  a  domain  of  his  own, 
on  which  he  does  not  mean  to  have  his  brother  Zeus 
trespassing  and  he  says  so.  Take,  then,  the  pageant  of 
Poseidon,  and  remembering  how  strong  are  his  feelings, 
how  clear  and  vivid  his  mind,  ask  what  it  means.  At 
Aegae,  "in  the  sea  depths,  his  famous  house  is  builded  of 
beaming  gold  imperishable ;  there  came  he,  and  yoked  be- 
neath the  car  his  bronzen-footed  horses,  swift  to  fly,  with 
long  manes  of  gold ;  and  he  arrayed  himself  in  gold,  and 
grasped  a  golden  well-wrought  whip  and  stepped  upon 
the  car,  and  drove  across  the  waves;  and  the  sea-beasts 
came  from  their  chambers  everywhere,  and  gambolled 
beneath  him,  knowing  well  their  king,  and  the  rejoicing 
sea  parted  before  him;  swiftly  the  horses  flew,  and  the 
bronzen  axle  was  not  wet  beneath."  He  came  to  the 
ships  of  the  Achaeans  with  a  purpose,  "sorely  wroth 
with  Zeus."  22  This  is  the  typical  Homeric  god — the  sort 
of  picture  that  the  Iliad,  taken  as  a  whole,  leaves  on  the 
mind.  Ultimately  impossible,  yes,  but  in  the  meantime 
splendid.  As  Dr.  Edward  Caird  put  it,  the  anthropo- 
morphism humanises  the  nature  powers  and  substitutes 
a  relation  to  man  for  a  relation  to  nature,  and  so  mediates 
a  transition  to  subjective  religion. 

Hints  of  the  goal  are  given  elsewhere  by  Homer.    At 
the  very  beginning  of  the  Iliad,  in  a  most  vivid  scene, 

21  Odyssey,   5.   68.     My  point  is   perhaps   all   the   stronger,   if   Mr.   J.    A.    K. 
Thomson  is  right  in  saying  that  the  blinding  of  Polyphemus  is  not  the  primary 
motive  (Studies  in  the  Odyssey,  p.   12). 

22  Iliad,  xiii.  22-30   (Purves). 


HOMER  65 

Athene  plucks  Achilles  by  the  hair  to  check  him  as  he 
thinks  to  draw  his  sword  on  Agamemnon.  In  the 
Odyssey  she  speaks  to  the  mind  of  Odysseus  suggest- 
ing a  thought  rather  than  uttering  a  command.  But 
more  striking  is  a  passage  where  the  poet  says, 
"As  when  the  mind  of  a  man  runs  up  and  down, 
a  traveller  over  much  of  earth,  and  he  thinks  in  his  deep 
heart,  'Would  I  were  here  or  there'  in  his  keen  desire; 
as  swift  as  that  did  the  lady  Hera  fly."  2S  The  swiftness 
of  thought  haunts  Homer;  and  here  for  once  he  makes 
his  goddess  as  spiritual  in  one  aspect  of  her  being  as 
thought  itself. 

Over  all,  and  very  nearly  supreme,  is  Zeus.  "Make 
trial,"  he  says  to  the  gods,  "if  ye  will,  that  all  may  know; 
let  down  a  golden  chain  from  heaven  to  earth,  and  all  ye 
gods  and  goddesses  take  hold,  but  ye  will  not  draw  down 
Zeus,  the  most  high  Counsellor,  from  heaven  to  the 
ground,  no,  not  with  much  endeavour.  But  were  I  to 
draw,  and  put  to  my  strength,  I  could  updraw  you  all, 
and  earth  and  sea  to  boot,  and  bind  the  chain  about  a  horn 
of  Olympus,  and  leave  all  hanging."  24  He  is  the  Thun- 
derer, he  sends  cloud  and  storm,  rain  and  snow,  and  sets 
the  rainbow  in  the  heavens.  Olympus  trembles  at  his 
nod.  He  rules  the  issues  of  war,  and  dispenses  joys  and 
ills  to  men  (Iliad,  xxiv.  527)  ;  he  is  the  guardian  of 
strangers  and  suppliants.  Neither  God  nor  mortal,  says 
Hermes,  can  elude  his  notice  or  thwart  his  plans  (Od.  v. 
104). 25  So  Homer  conceives  of  One  who  rules  the  world 
and  has  a  place  for  man  in  his  thoughts. 

But  Zeus  is  not  always  omnipotent  nor  always  omni- 
scient. Hera  beguiles  him,  in  a  famous  episode;  sleep 
ensnares  him;  his  attention  wanders  (Iliad,  xiii.  7),  and 
Poseidon  takes  advantage  of  it.  Zeus  goes  to  feast  with 

23  Iliad,  xv.  80. 

24  Iliad,  viii.  18-26. 

25  Cf.  passages  set  out  by  T.  D.  Seymour,  Life  MI  the  Homeric  Age,  p.  421. 


66  PROGRESS  IN  RELIGION 

the  blameless  Aethiopians,  apparently  unaware  of  the 
storm  of  trouble  to  break  on  the  Greek  camp  before  he 
returns  (Iliad,  i.  424).  Zeus  himself  has  to  shed  tears 
for  Sarpedon,  but  he  cannot  save  him  from  death,  nor 
Hector  either,  though  he  pities  him.  He  commits  adul- 
tery, but  he  warns  Aegisthus  not  to  do  it  (Od.  i.  37). 
He  shows  anger  and  enjoys  the  bickering  of  his  court. 

In  short,  there  are  inconsistencies  in  Homer,  as  we 
might  expect.  Some  of  them  may,  as  scholars  have  said, 
be  due  to  differences  of  date  and  hand  in  the  final  form 
of  the  poems.  Some  are  obviously  due  to  the  difficulty 
of  expressing  the  unseen  and  the  spiritual  in  the  language 
available.  Homer  as  a  rule  tells  of  nothing  but  what 
can  be  seen,  or  at  least  pictured  under  conditions  of 
sense;  and  he  has  the  drawback  of  every  great  thinker, 
especially  of  poets — that  swiftness  of  mind  which  seizes 
a  thought  and  transforms  it  to  vision  there  and  then,  re- 
gardless for  the  moment  of  other  thoughts;  which  im- 
pulsively makes  a  new  conception  its  own  and  leaves  a 
mass  of  ideas  to  be  corrected  or  transformed  later  on, 
if  at  all.  If  he  were  a  modern  dreamer,  if  he  were  not 
an  ancient  poet,  supposed  to  be  simple  and  na'ive,  he 
would  not  be  expected  to  achieve  consistency  in  his  pic- 
ture of  the  divine  in  relation  to  man  and  the  universe, 
perhaps  hardly  even  to  aim  at  it.  After  all,  he  does  give 
a  fair  representation,  with  the  means  at  his  disposal  (who 
could  demand  more  of  a  poet?),  of  the  difficulty  and 
confusion  of  the  world,  of  its  subjection  to  moral  law 
and  to  ideal  forces,  and  of  the  gaps  that  men  find  with 
agony  in  the  moral  order  itself.  Those  ideal  forces,  the 
spiritual  element  in  things — perhaps  because  he  has  to 
represent  them  along  the  lines  of  tradition,  perhaps  be- 
cause his  own  mind  sees  and  feels  all  things  in  pictures — 
he  represents  in  the  shape  of  other  beings  like  men.28 

26  Using  suggestions  of  Dr.  E.  Caird,  Evolution  of  Religion,  i.  288-291. 


HOMER  67 

The  gods  are  not  men,  but  to  bring  gods  and  men  together 
he  has  to  get  them  on  one  plane,  visibly,  actually,  and 
Athene,  unseen  by  the  others,  takes  Achilles  by  the  yellow 
hair  and  checks  his  fury  (Iliad,  i.  197).  Homer  is  not 
using  metaphor  of  purpose,  nor  playing  (as  Virgil  some- 
times does,  or  seems  to  do,  and  Spenser  often)  with  a 
hapless  compound,  an  allegory  half  spiritual  principle, 
half  material  symbol,  concocted  for  an  ethical  purpose 
to  the  ruin  of  reality  and  art.  He  sees  what  he  tells,  he 
does  not  moralise  it — it  is  moral  of  itself;  but,  as  Dr. 
Caird  says,27  he  exercises  an  instinctive  selection,  which  is 
as  enlightening  as  a  scientific  man's  deliberative  selection 
of  illustrations  to  throw  light  on  a  law  of  nature. 

To  say  what  a  great  poet  intends  to  teach  is  to  speak 
rather  naively.  Wordsworth,  in  his  famous  Letter  to  a 
Friend  of  Robert  Burns,  deals  with  Tarn  o'  Shanter — 
"I  pity  him,"  he  says,  "who  cannot  perceive  that,  in  all 
this,  though  there  was  no  moral  purpose,  there  is  a  moral 
effect."  Poets  do  not,  till  they  decline  into  the  auto- 
biographical stage,  tell  us  their  purposes.  Homer,  so  far 
as  we  know,  never  reached  that  stage,  and  we  have  to 
divine  what  he  "meant"  and  what  he  thought.  His  pic- 
ture of  the  world  of  gods  is  full  of  inconsistencies  and 
impossibilities;  and  so  far  it  fairly  represents  the  order 
and  disorder  of  the  world  in  which  he  lived  and  we  live. 
He  has  no  theory  of  the  universe,  complete,  satisfactory, 
and  water-tight.  The  authors  of  such  theories  rarely  live 
or  gain  acceptance.  Homer  gives  us  views,  impressions, 
intuitions;  some  part  of  what  he  gives  is,  no  doubt,  tra- 
ditional, some  of  it  is  his  own ;  a  minute  analysis  of  this 
is  beyond  us,  but  happily  it  is  not  necessary. 

Over  all,  perhaps  over  Zeus,  we  are  told,  Homer  finds 
Fate  (Moira  and  Aisa).2B  Perhaps  he  did,  but  intermit- 

27  E.  Caird,  Evolution  of  Religion,  i.  288. 

28  On  all  this,  T.  D.  Seymour,  Life  in  the  Homeric  Age,  p.  419. 


68  PROGRESS  IN  RELIGION 

tently,  and  with  no  such  interpretation  as  a  modern  de- 
terminist  gives  to  it.  But  his  expressions  vary.  Some- 
times Fate  is  superior  to  the  gods  of  Olympus,  sometimes 
it  seems  subject  to  them.  Sometimes  it  is  associated 
vaguely  with  Zeus,  and  is  actually  transcended  vnkpAioS 
alffav,  Iliad,  xvii.  321 )  ;  sometimes  with  a  vague  daimon 
or  god  (Odyssey,  xi.  61,  292).  No  prayer  is  addressed 
to  Fate;  how  could  it  be?  A  man  has  his  moira,  and 
there  it  is;  there  is  an  end  of  it.  Zeus  himself  laments 
the  moira  of  his  son  Sarpedon,  who  was  fated  to  be  slain 
by  Patroclus  (Iliad,  xvi.  434,  435),  and  he  wavers  as  to 
rescuing  him ;  but  Hera  reminds  him  that  Sarpedon  was 
"long  doomed  by  aisa"  na\ai  n^npca^kvov  aiffr),  441), 
and  warns  him  that  other  gods  will  wish  to  save  theif 
sons,  and  Zeus  submits.  Zeus,  speaking  of  Aegisthus, 
protests  how  vainly  men  blame  the  gods  for  evils  which 
they  bring  upon  themselves  (Od.  i.  32).  Sometimes  it 
looks  as  if  the  will  of  Zeus  were  itself  Fate;  there  is  the 
"thought  of  mighty  Zeus,"  which  is  destiny  (cf.  Iliad, 
xvii.  409  and  xvii.  329).  When  Achilles  and  Agamem- 
non quarrel,  and  their  wrath  sends  many  goodly  souls  of 
heroes  to  Hades,  "the  counsel  of  Zeus  was  fulfilled,"  we 
are  told;  and  we  learn  a  little  later  that  Zeus  was  away 
among  the  Aethiopians  at  the  time  of  the  quarrel,  and 
only  later  at  the  prayer  of  Thetis  planned  death  for  the 
Achaeans.  But  if  Homer  is  inconsistent  with  himself 
when  he  speaks  of  Fate,  who  yet  has  spoken  of  Fate  and 
escaped  inconsistency? 

The  weakest  point  of  Olympus  is  its  morality.  Many 
of  the  scandals  are  due  to  the  syncretism  which  welded, 
as  we  have  seen,  many  gods  into  one  god,  and  gave  many 
legends  to  one  Zeus.  The  Zeus  of  one  place  has  a  hero 
son  by  one  woman,  the  Zeus  of  another  shrine  by  an- 
other; but  there  is  only  one  Zeus,  so  the  women  and  the 
sons  and  the  scandals  multiply,  and  Homer,  in  a  mali- 


HOMER  69 

cious  mood,  or  more  probably  an  interpolator,  seizes  a 
chance  to  recite  a  string  of  such  episodes  at  once  (Iliad, 
xiv.  314-327).  Other  gods  had  their  local  legends,  and 
they  also  paid  the  same  price  for  the  splendid  individual 
personality  that  the  poet  gave  them.  But  this  is  not  the 
only  source  of  these  legends  of  light  love;  for  it  ran 
long  in  the  Greek  mind  that  one  of  the  real  advantages 
of  power  was  its  freedom  to  follow  impulse.29  When 
the  gods  became  anthropomorphic,  they  were  given  hu- 
man desires  and  human  passions — an  advance  indeed 
upon  plant  or  animal  life,  and  upon  the  dim  bogey  ex- 
istence, but  not  a  final  stage.  They  had  reached  a  point 
where  moral  judgments  were  inevitable.  No  one  could 
profitably  apply  moral  criticism  to  a  seamist,30  a  river,  or 
a  tree.  When  the  gods  became  persons,  they  came  under 
a  higher  law,  at  first  fitfully  recognised.  Mankind  has 
long  found  it  hard  to  believe  that  absolute  power  does 
not  absolve  from  moral  responsibility.  Islam  and  the 
history  of  Sultans  and  Roman  Emperors  bear  witness 
to  that  weakness  of  thought.  But  thought  prevails,  and 
morality  is  inherent  in  a  thought-out  view  of  personality ; 
the  gods  had  to  become  moral.  In  Homer  they  are  be- 
hind the  best  of  the  heroes  in  those  qualities  which  men 
recognise  as  highest;  and  the  point  could  not  escape  no- 
tice. "Even  in  Homer,"  writes  Professor  John  Watson, 
"there  are  elements  which  show  that  the  Greek  religion 
must  ultimately  accomplish  its  own  euthanasia.  There 
was  in  it  from  the  first  a  latent  contradiction  which  could 
not  fail  to  manifest  itself  openly  later  on."  S1  It  is  a 
mark  of  progress  to  have  reached  an  impossible  halting- 
place,  to  be  compelled  to  move  onward. 

When  we  turn  to  Homer's  heroes  to  learn  their  mind 

29  It  was  not  till  Euripides  that  protest  was  made  against  myths  of  the 
loves  of  the  gods;  Aeschylus,  Pindar  and  Sophocles  accept  them. 

so  If  Thetis  comes  up  from  the  sea  like  a  mist  (Iliad,  i.  359)  she  came  as 
a  person,  with  a  personal  motive. 

31  Christianity  and  Idealism,  p.  29. 


70  PROGRESS  IN  RELIGION 

as  to  the  gods,  all  is  so  simple  and  natural  as  to  occasion 
at  first  little  remark.  The  priest  Chryses  prays  as  simply 
and  directly  to  Apollo  as  if  he  were  talking  to  a  human 
being.  "If  ever  I  have  laid  roof  upon  thy  fair  temple, 
if  ever  I  have  burned  to  thee  fat  thighs  of  bulls  and  goats, 
fulfil  my  prayer."  82  This  is  the  regular  line  of  appeal 
to  the  gods,  and  they  expect  it  (cf.  Iliad,  ix.  953  ff. ;  xv. 
368  ff.).  And  Apollo  does  fulfil  the  prayer.  If  Chryses 
had  ever  been  initiated,  if  he  had  known  rapture,  illumi- 
nation, identification  with  his  god,  we  should  never  guess 
it  from  his  prayer  and  his  attitude.  After  all,  identifica- 
tion with  Homer's  Apollo,  or  Homer's  Athene,  is  not  an 
aspiration  that  would  readily  occur  to  any  one.  They 
are  definite  persons — concrete,  one  might  say — not  vague 
spirits,  not  influences.  There  is  no  atmosphere  of  mys- 
tery about  them — in  any  sense  of  the  word  mystery. 
Homer  knows  of  rites  proper  to  the  gods  concerned,  of 
sacrifices  to  accompany  the  cremation  of  the  dead,  of 
offerings  to  take  Odysseus  safely  into  the  realm  of  Hades 
and  out  of  it  again — but  he  does  not  know  of  sacraments 
strictly  so  called;  or,  if  he  does  know,  he  disregards  them. 
While  he  knows  of  priests  like  Chryses,  most  of  the  he- 
roes manage  their  own  religion  without  priests.  It  may 
be  that  in  the  Iliad  the  heroes  are  all  away  from  home, 
far  from  familiar  or  even  recognised  shrines,  but  in  the 
Odyssey  most  of  the  people  are  at  home  or  near  home 
and  are  as  little  concerned  with  such  things;  and  among 
the  tales  the  heroes  tell,  among  the  long  fictions  of  Odys- 
seus and  the  long  reminiscences  of  Nestor,  nothing  occurs 
that  suggests  the  intenser  forms  of  religion  which  later 
Greece  knew — no  trance,  no  ecstasy,  no  rapture.  Nor 
are  there  very  clear  traces  of  those  earlier  rituals,  found 
among  primitive  peoples,  found  too  in  a  modified  form 

32  Iliad,  i.  39;  cf.  Iliad,  xxiv.  33,  Apollo  to  the  gods  on  the  subject  of  Hec- 
tor's sacrifices. 


HOMER  71 

among  later  Greeks,  rituals  of  sowing,  reaping,  and  vin- 
tage— mysterious  "doings"  to  make  the  seed  grow  or  the 
vine  bear.  Once  again,  if  in  the  Iliad  the  Homeric  peo- 
ple are  abroad  and  away  from  home,  in  the  Odyssey  they 
are  not. 

Arguments  from  silence  vary  in  value  a  great  deal 
with  the  subject  concerned  and  with  the  opportunities  of 
speech;  here  silence  does  not  seem  accidental.  Either 
Homer  did  not  know  of  such  matters,  or  he  was  not  in- 
terested in  them.  Guesses  as  to  the  tribal  cults  of  the 
various  peoples  in  his  poems — Achaeans,  Northerners, 
the  Mediterranean  race 33 — have  some  interest,  but 
guesses  as  a  rule  do  not  greatly  add  to  knowledge.  It  is 
likely  that  some  mysteries,  some  agricultural  "doings," 
were  to  be  found  in  the  world  round  Homer;  but  whether 
he  sang  to  please  his  hearers  and  we  are  to  conclude  their 
tastes  from  his  silences,  or  whether  he  sang  to  please  him- 
self— as  poets  seem  more  apt  to  do — what  he  does  say 
and  what  he  does  not  say  are  both  significant.  There  is 
endless  debate  on  Shakespeare's  mind,  and  no  one  can 
say  that  his  constituents  or  patrons  (as  one  may  prefer 
to  describe  them)  were  not  interested  in  religious  contro- 
versy; are  we  to  say  then  that  it  was  only  because  the 
law  was  against  such  discussion  in  the  theatre,  that  he 
kept  off  religious  questions  ?  Or  did  his  mind  move  more 
naturally  in  other  directions?  One  mark  of  genius  is 
that  it  feels  very  little  the  hamperings  of  tradition,  ac- 
cepts them,  and  goes  its  own  way  none  the  less  and  finds 
the  freedom  that  is  supposed  to  be  denied  it. 

On  the  other  hand,  we  have  to  consider  the  Lay  of 
Demodocos  and  how  all  the  gods  came  to  see  Ares  snared 
in  the  arms  of  Aphrodite,  and  how  one  commented  lightly 
to  another — and  the  stories  of  the  beguiling  of  Zeus  by 
Hera,  of  the  wounding  of  Ares  and  of  Aphrodite  by 

88  Cf.  W.  Leaf,  Homer  and  History,  258-262. 


72  PROGRESS  IN  RELIGION 

heroes  in  battle,  of  the  limping  of  Hephaistos  and  the 
laughter  of  the  gods.  Are  they  from  the  same  hand  as 
the  rest  of  the  poems?  Interpolations  are  admitted;  are 
these  interpolations?  Are  they  from  the  same  school? 
Were  these  gods  worshipped?  Is  there  a  "Milesian" 
irreverence  about  the  tales  and  about  the  tone,  that  im- 
plies either  that  these  gods  had  lost  the  faith  of  the  peo- 
ple or  had  not  yet  gained  it — that  "Olympianism"  was 
dying  or  had  not  yet  got  its  foothold?  The  answer  is 
that  these  questions  are  in  the  vein  of  Plato  and  Prot- 
estantism; they  imply  an  intenser  belief  in  God  than  we 
find  in  such  periods  of  religion  as  we  are  considering. 
There  is  little  to  choose  between  Plato  and  John  Knox 
in  the  fierceness  with  which  they  do  battle  for  God  and 
His  character.  But  if  we  turn  to  India — at  any  rate 
before  European  culture  became  a  factor  in  its  thought — 
the  legends  of  Krishna  were  accepted  more  or  less  as 
they  stood  by  men  whose  religion  was  intensely  personal 
and  even  spiritual.  The  moral  issue  was  not  considered, 
or  it  was  waived,  it  was  not  relevant,  and  broadly  it  did 
not  occur  to  the  mind  as  bearing  on  the  reality,  or  the 
godhead,  of  the  god.  It  is  when  a  community  wakes  up 
to  progress  in  religion  that  such  an  issue  becomes  vital 
and  of  first  importance;  and  then  the  first  defence,  as 
we  see  in  Plato,  in  Plutarch,  and  in  Hinduism,  is  Alle- 
gory. But  for  Homer  there  is  not  Allegory,  despite  his 
Stoic  and  Neo-Platonist  commentators.  For  Hesiod 
there  is.8* 

In  the  background,  waiting  for  a  congenial  renais- 
sance, are  the  gods  of  earth  and  grain,  of  mystery,  in- 
toxication and  psychopathic  phenomena.  They  are  to 
re-emerge,  but  it  remains  that  the  first  great  Greek — in 
the  deepest  and  most  Hellenic  sense  in  which  anybody 
could  be  called  Greek — was  not  interested  in  such  gods; 

34  Cf.  page  8r. 


HOMER  73 

and  that  is  as  significant  as  any  polemic.  'Ev  ye  <f>det  Hal 
oteffffov — says  one  of  the  heroes : "Kill  me,  yes!  but  in 
the  light."  35  Homer  stands  in  the  daylight — a  mind  with 
the  characteristics  of  open  air  and  sunshine;  and,  as  we 
gather  from  the  Fourth  Gospel,  a  mind  of  that  type  is 
dynamic,  vital  in  its  tacit  criticism,  in  its  telling  effect. 

There  is  for  the  Homeric  hero  a  relation  between  his 
gods  and  morality.  Zeus  does  not  himself  punish  A'egis- 
thus  for  adultery  and  murder,  but  he  warns  him  that  he 
will  not  go  unpunished  (Od.  i.  37).  "The  blessed  Gods 
love  not  wicked  deeds"  (Od.  xiv.  83).  Zeus  sends  storms 
and  floods  in  anger  upon  men  who  give  "crooked  judg- 
ments" (ffjto\id$  Ofyiffra?)  in  the  assembly  (Iliad,  xvi. 
387).  "Of  the  Ten  Commandments  of  the  Israelites," 
writes  Professor  Seymour,  "the  Achaeans  in  strictness 
had  but  two — 'Thou  shalt  not  take  the  name  of  a  God 
in  vain,'  and  'Honour  thy  father  and  mother.' '  With 
respect  to  Zeus,  a  third  commandment  may  be  formu- 
lated as  "Thou  shalt  have  respect  unto  the  stranger  and 
the  suppliant  to  pity  them"  (Od.  v.  447;  ix.  270;  xiv. 
404). 

The  two  dominant  conceptions  which  rule  conduct  are 
Custom  and  Aidos.  Custom  we  can  still,  even  in  such 
an  age  as  this,  understand,  if  we  do  not  give  it  the  old 
respect.  It  made  a  large  part  of  life  throughout  Greek 
history,  as  the  complaint  that  tyrants  change  old  cus- 
toms 38  tells  us.  Custom  is  the  protective  thing  in  re- 
ligion. The  element  that  makes  for  progress  is  Aidos — 
a  hard  word  to  translate  alike  in  every  passage — but  a 
conception  intelligible  to  every  simple  and  clear  nature; 
it  includes  reverence  for  others,  for  the  aged,  the  sup- 
pliant "  and  the  dead — self-respect  and  the  sense  of  duty 

35  Iliad,  xvii.  647. 

36  Herodotus,  iii.  80. 

37  Cf.  the  great  passage  about  Prayers,  "Daughters  of  Zeus"  (.Iliad,  ix.  497- 
512),  and  the  coining  of  Priam  to  Achilles  (Iliad,  xxiv.). 


74  PROGRESS  IN  RELIGION 

— honour.  These  are  the  sides  of  life  where  education 
is  continuous,  where  by  the  unobtrusive  play  of  sym- 
pathy and  human  feeling  the  outlook  broadens  and  the 
insight  deepens,  and  new  gleams  come  of  something  be- 
yond custom  and  tradition.  Horizons  grow  wider,  as  one 
learns  to  know  and  to  respect  one's  enemy — the  man  one 
hates — the  foreigner,  the  Trojan.  Priam's  helpless  age 
— his  grief  for  his  son — the  laughter  of  Hector  and  An- 
dromache, as  the  baby  turns  his  head  away  from  the  nod- 
ding plumes — the  tales  of  old  Eumaeus — the  sight  of  the 
helpless  dead;  do  they  bear  on  religion?  How  can  they 
but  bear  on  it  ?  "It  is  not  holy  to  boast  over  men  slain" 
(Od.  xxiv.  412).  The  gods,  it  is  true,  show  little  trace 
of  Aidos.  Zeus  twits  Hera  with  her  readiness  to  eat 
Priam  raw  and  Priam's  children  with  him  (Iliad,  iv.  35). 
And  yet  the  gods  too  can  be  appeased  by  sacrifice  and 
supplication,  if  a  man  have  sinned  (Iliad,  ix.  497  f.). 
Athene  enjoys  the  cunning  and  the  lies  of  Odysseus  (Od. 
xiii.  287.).  She  deceives  Hector  at  the  crisis  of  his  fate 
— "Athene  hath  betrayed  me!"  (Iliad,  xxii.  296);  in- 
deed the  gods  habitually  deceive  men.  But  "hateful  to 
me  as  the  gates  of  Hades,"  cries  Achilles,  "is  he  who 
hides  one  thing  in  his  heart  and  speaks  another"  (Iliad, 
iv.  312).  There  lies  the  promise  of  progress. 

Homer  moved  everything  forward  when  he  gave  to 
the  gods  their  bright  personality,  and  made  every  one  of 
them  so  intensely  individual,  so  human;  when  he  brought 
religion  into  daylight,  out  into  the  field  of  battle,  into  the 
council  chamber,  away  from  cave  and  shrine  and  twi- 
light. He  moved  everything  forward  when  he  turned 
his  imagination  on  to  the  life  of  heroes,  when  he  con- 
ceived and  worked  out  Achilles  in  his  heart  and  in  his 
brain,  when  he  woke  to  the  finer  shades  of  honour  and 
feeling,  and  wove  them  into  the  characters  of  the  men 
whom  he  gave  us  to  love  and  to  admire.  His  decalogue 


HOMER  75 

is  a  short  one,  but  it  can  be  summed  up  in  words  he  never 
spoke  or  hinted.  He  loved  men  and  their  life — their 
fierce,  keen,  bright,  tender  spirits;  he  was  a  "human 
Catholic"  indeed,  and  such  men  are  never  far  from  the 
Kingdom  of  Heaven.  He  never  told  us  to  love  men;  he 
knew  of  no  Kingdom  of  Heaven;  his  other  world  is  very 
dim,  very  empty  of  life  and  personality;  but  he  did  be- 
lieve in  men. 

What  does  a  great  poet  achieve  ?    Let  us  borrow  words, 
and,  altering  a  tense  and  a  pronoun  or  two,  say : 

He  gives  us  eyes,  he  gives  us  ears, 
And  humble  cares,  and  delicate  fears, 
A  heart,  the  fountain  of  sweet  tears; 
And  love,  and  thought,  and  joy. 

And  these  gifts  are  dynamic.  Homer  gave  them  to  his 
fellow  countrymen.  He  made  them  Hellenic,  taught 
them  how  to  see  and  what  to  look  for.  "Love  and 
thought  and  joy"  may  be  an  abstract  way  of  describing 
the  effect  of  his  work;  but  it  is  true.  He  made  the  Greeks, 
and  he  taught  them  to  think  and  to  feel.  The  pictures 
he  gave  them  of  gods  would  not  endure — because  he  gave 
them  something  else,  the  spirit  that  makes  men  ask  more 
of  themselves,  more  of  the  universe,  more  of  God.  His 
heroes  are,  morally  and  spiritually,  ahead  of  their  own 
gods.  Custom  is  reluctant  to  accept  new  views  of  the 
gods ;  Poetry  forced  new  ideals  upon  the  Greeks.  Homer, 
by  making  his  gods  so  human,  brought  them  into  the 
sphere  where  they  must  be  amenable  to  the  new  ideals. 
The  gods  did  not  reach  those  ideals;  they  slowly  died 
away  into  insignificance;  the  ideals  lived,  and  the  Greeks 
moved  forward  to  a  higher  view  of  God.  But  Homer 
also  delayed  their  progress.  He  had  indeed,  as  Herodo- 
tus suggests,  given  form  and  look  and  function  to  the 
gods;  he  gave  them  personality;  he  fixed  their  legends 


76  PROGRESS  IN  RELIGION 

and  made  them  immortal  by  the  beauty  of  his  thought 
and  the  beauty  of  his  word.  He  gave  currency  to  a  con- 
ception of  the  gods,  which  warred  with  the  quickening 
of  the  Greek  mind.  The  spirit  of  the  poet  set  things  mov- 
ing; his  words,  his  pictures,  retarded  the  movement.  The 
old  quarrel  of  which  Plato  speaks  88  between  Poetry  and 
Thought  was  fairly  started — started  by  Homer  himself, 
and  to  both  combatants  Homer  gave  the  impulse. 

88  Republic,  x.  607  B. 


IV 
THE  BEGINNINGS  OF  GREEK  CRITICISM 

THE  Homeric  age  of  Greece  passed — that  is  a  statement 
no  one  will  dispute;  but  how  it  passed,  few  will  care  to 
say  with  any  tone  of  certainty.  It  may  be  that  the 
Achaean  invaders,  as  happened  with  the  Normans  in  Eng- 
land and  the  Highland  regiments  in  Quebec,  were  merged 
in  the  peoples  they  found,  by  the  slow  but  sure  processes 
of  intermarriage.  It  may  be  that  this  had  already  hap- 
pened when  Homer  made  his  poems.  It  may  be  that  a 
destroyer,  Minos,  overwhelmed  the  old  civilisation  of  the 
Aegean  basin — that  Homer's  Agamemnon  and  the  My- 
cenaean king  of  the  Archaeologists  both  met  murder  and 
sudden  death.  I  at  least  cannot  speak  of  those  times; 
what  we  call  a  dark  age  followed  them — dark  in  any  case 
to  the  historian,  dark  enough  and  full  of  ominous  change 
for  the  men  of  the  day. 

One  man  of  that  age  of  change,  whatever  his  century, 
was  Hesiod  the  poet,  a  man  born  to  trouble.  His  brother, 
he  says,  robbed  him  in  the  division  of  their  inheritance, 
with  at  least  the  hope  of  aid  from  bribe-devouring 
princes.1  Hesiod  appears  to  suggest  some  fair  arrange- 
ment which  may  disappoint  the  false  judges.  Whatever 
was  done,  Hesiod  gave  a  great  deal  of  good  advice  to  his 
unfriendly  brother,  with  what  effect  we  do  not  know, 
though  we  may  guess.  Their  father  "was  wont  to  sail  in 
ships,  seeking  a  goodly  livelihood:  who  also  on  a  time 
came  hither,  traversing  a  great  space  of  sea  in  his  black 
ship  from  Aeolian  Kyme,  not  fleeing  from  abundance  nor 

1  Works  and  Days,  27  ff, 

77 


78  PROGRESS  IN  RELIGION 

from  riches  and  weal,  but  from  evil  penury,  which  Zeus 
giveth  unto  men.  And  he  made  his  dwelling  near  Helicon 
in  a  sorry  township,  bad  in  winter,  hard  in  summer,  never 
good/' 2  Thucydides  long  after  said  the  Hesiod  was 
murdered  by  the  people  of  the  Locrian  Nemea.8  So, 
waiving  all  the  later  legends,  there  we  have  a  picture  of 
the  times — penury,  bad  towns,  shipping,  trade,  settlers, 
robbery,  unjust  judges  and  murder.  "The  earth  is  full 
of  evils,"  he  says,  "and  full  is  the  sea."  *  It  is  the  pic- 
ture we  have  glanced  at  already,  but  drawn  by  a  gloomy 
man,  "a  dour  son  of  the  soil,"  6  whose  one  voyage  was 
across  the  Euripus,  a  sea-passage  to  be  measured  in 
yards.6 

Looked  at  more  broadly,  it  is  a  period  which  sooner 
or  later  saw  great  movements  of  races.  Cimmerians  and 
Treres,  and  later  on  Scythians,  broke  into  Asia  Minor 
and  swept  through  it,  away  to  Gaza  and  to  Mesopotamia, 
and  back  again  to  Lydia.  Kingdoms  and  nations  rose 
and  fell — Hittites,  Phrygians  and  Lydians  westward; 
and  eastward,  Assyrians,  Babylonians  and  Medes.  The 
Greeks  of  the  Asian  shore,  in  walled  cities,  on  peninsulas, 
or  bays  girt  by  hills,  lived  a  kind  of  island  life,  trading 
and  travelling  to  escape  from  "evil  penury,"  and  with  a 
desire  already  to  see  the  world.  They  built  their  ships 
and  learnt  their  seas  and  coast-lines,  watching  the  stars 
above  and  the  eddies  and  currents  of  the  sea  below  them, 
and  grew  into  that  self-reliance  which  the  sailor  always 
needs  and  generally  develops,  and  into  that  individuality 
which  made  the  Greek  race  outstanding  among  all  the 
tribes  of  man.  The  sailor-people  were  for  democracy  in 
their  home-towns,  as  against  the  land-holders,  and  the 
long  series  of  Greek  experiments  in  government  went 

2  Works  and  Days,  633  f. 

3  Thucydides,  Hi.  96. 

4  Works  and  Days,   101. 

B  Cf.  C.  H.  Moore,  Religious  Thought  of  the  Greeks,  p.  28. 
6  Works  and  D»ys,  648  ff. 


BEGINNINGS  OF  GREEK  CRITICISM        79 

vigorously  on.  We  find  men  from  these  Asian  Greek 
cities  discovering  Gibraltar,7  fighting  at  Babylon,8  carv- 
ing their  names  on  the  legs  of  colossal  statues  at  Abu- 
Symbel,  hundreds  of  miles  up  the  Nile.  In  these  cities 
began  Greek  philosophy.  The  period  before  us  is  a  long 
one,  from  Homer,  whose  date  I  do  not  know,  though  I 
suspect  it  to  be  earlier  than  thirty  years  ago  it  was  fash- 
ionable to  say — down  to  the  Persian  wars — let  us  say, 
to  the  battle  of  Salamis  in  480.  There  will  be  every 
temptation  to  linger  and  to  wander  in  a  period  so  long 
and  so  full  of  interest  of  every  kind;  we  must  try  to  re- 
member that  our  subject  is  Progress  in  Religion,  but  not 
quite  to  forget  how  much  this  is  conditioned  by  social 
and  economic  environment.  We  must  remember,  too, 
the  forces  working  for  and  against  progress — how  senti- 
ment, ignorance  and  terror  retard  it,  how  enquiry  and 
thought  and  clearness,  which  are  Greek  habits  of  mind, 
promote  it.  Greeks  had  one  advantage  over  Indians  and 
over  later  Semites,  Jews  and  Moslems,  in  not  having 
sacred  books.  Homer  wrote  no  Vedas;  and  when  the 
nearest  things  to  Vedas  that  Greece  knew  came  into  be- 
ing, the  habits  of  the  race  were  formed,  and  Homer  was 
there  to  overshadow  all  sacred  and  theogonic  poetry.  His 
genius  kept  the  Hellen  in  the  open  air. 

Hesiod,  however,  is  our  present  concern — named,  as 
we  saw,  by  Herodotus  (ii.  53)  as  one  of  the  founders 
of  Greek  tradition  about  the  gods.  He  tells  us  himself, 
what  Homer  never  did,  how  he  became  a  poet — a  small 
hint  of  a  new  significance  of  the  individual.  "The  Muses 
of  old  taught  Hesiod  sweet  song  what  time  he  tended  his 
sheep  under  holy  Helicon.  These  words  first  spake  to 
me  the  goddess  Muses  of  Olympus,  daughters  of  aegis- 
bearing  Zeus:  'Shepherds  of  the  fields,  evil  thing  of 


7  Kolaios  of  Samos;  Herodotus,  iv.  152. 

8  Antimcnidas,  brother  of  the  poet  Alca 


poet  Alcaeus. 


80  PROGRESS  IN  RELIGION 

shame,  bellies  only!  We  know  to  speak  many  lies  like 
unto  truth;  we  know,  when  we  will,  the  truth  to  speak.' 
So  spake  the  daughters  of  mighty  Zeus,  clear  of  speech; 
and  they  gave  me  a  rod,  a  shaft  of  lusty  laurel  that  they 
had  plucked,  wondrous  to  see ;  and  they  breathed  into  me 
a  voice  divine  that  I  might  tell  of  things  to  be  and  of 
things  aforetime.  They  bade  me  sing  the  race  of  the 
Blessed  that  live  forever,  and  always  to  sing  themselves 
first  and  last."  9  And  he  won  a  prize  for  song,  a  tripod, 
on  his  one  journey  to  Euboea,  and  offered  it  up  to  the 
Muses;  and  Pausanias  saw  it  on  Helicon  in  the  second 
century  A.D.  or  one  that  passed  for  it.10 

Hesiod  devoted  himself  to  the  collection  and  ordering 
of  the  traditions  of  the  gods.  His  verse  and  language 
show  the  influence  of  Homer,11  his  cosmogony  and 
theology  other  strains  than  the  Homeric,  just  as  his 
scheme  of  life  comprises  more  taboos  and  more  veiled 
suggestions  of  magic.12  He  pursues  his  gods  into  a 
remoter  past.  Chaos,  Earth  and  Eros  come  first;  Chaos 
engenders  Darkness  and  Black  Night — 'Night  is  mother 
of  Aether  and  Day.  Earth  bore  Heaven  and  the  Moun- 
tains and  the  Sea,  and  many  more  children  by  Heaven 
— monstrous  and  odious  children,  till  Cronos  mutilated 
Heaven  and  there  was  an  end  of  it.13  The  gross  old 
story  must  be  very  old;  but  the  steady  systematisation 
of  all  is  very  modern;  it  is  next  thing  to  criticism;  and 
such  accommodations  of  criticism  and  the  uncriticised 
prepare  the  future.  The  old  myth  and  the  new  allegory, 
the  Titan,  the  monster  and  the  personified  abstract  noun 
(Memory,  for  instance,  and  Lying  Speeches)  will  not  go 
together;  they  belong  to  different  stages  of  thought,  and 
a  system  that  puts  them  on  one  footing  has  written  upon 

8  Theognis,  22  ff. 

10  IVorks  and  Days,  648  ff ;  Pausanias,  ix.  31,  3. 

11  Chadwick,  Heroic  Age,  pp.  214,  230. 

12  T.  E.  Harrison,  Themis,  p.  94. 
iSTheognis,  160  ff. 


BEGINNINGS  OF  GREEK  CRITICISM        81 

it  its  own  certain  resolution  into  its  elements.  The  tales 
of  grossness  and  fear  were  to  live  long;  but  some  of  the 
newer  ideas  also  were  to  thrive. 

It  is  in  Hesiod  that  we  first  find  the  distinction  drawn 
between  gods  and  those  intermediate  beings  which  later 
Greeks  call  "daemons" — beings  more  like  the  later 
Hebrew  "angels"  than  the  "daemons"  of  primitive  agri- 
cultural Greece.  These  midway  beings  were  the  very 
keystone  of  later  Greek  theology,  and  Plutarch  blesses 
the  man  who  introduced  them,  whether  Zoroaster  or 
Orpheus  or  an  Egyptian;  he  remarks  that  Homer  used 
"gods"  and  "daemons"  as  synonyms,  and  that  Hesiod 
was  the  first  clearly  to  distinguish  the  four  orders  of 
gods,  daemons,  heroes  and  men.14  It  was  in  Hesiod,  Dr. 
Adam  notes,  a  symptom  of  the  tendency  to  remove  the 
Supreme  God  from  direct  part  in  men's  affairs.  And 
perhaps  something  may  be  put  down  to  poetic  feeling. 
"For  near  at  hand,  among  men,  Immortals  take  note 
who  by  crooked  decisions  oppress  each  other,  heeding 
not  the  gods.  For  thrice  ten  thousand  Immortals  are 
there  on  all-feeding  earth,  warders  of  Zeus  over  mortal 
men,  who  watch  over  justice  and  harsh  deeds — clad  in 
darkness,  passing  to  and  fro  over  earth.  Yea,  and  there 
is  the  maiden  Justice,  born  of  Zeus,  glorious  and  wor- 
shipful among  the  gods  that  hold  Olympus.  And  when 
one  injures  her  with  crooked  reviling,  straightway  as  she 
sitteth  by  Zeus  her  father,  son  of  Cronos,  she  telleth  him 
the  mind  of  unrighteous  men."  15  A  line  or  two  later 
he  heightens  what  he  has  said:  "The  eye  of  Zeus,  that 
hath  seen  all  and  marked  all,  looketh  on  these  things  too, 
if  he  will,  and  he  faileth  not  to  behold  what  manner  of 
justice  our  city  keepeth  within."  ie  Here  at  least  heaven 

14  Plutarch,  de  dejectu   oraculorum,  x.   414  F-4isA.     Conflict  of  Religions., 
PP.  97.  98. 

IB  Works  and  Days,  249,  250. 
16  Works  and  Days,  267-269. 


82  PROGRESS  IN  RELIGION 

is  more  righteous  than  in  the  Theogony,  where  the  gods 
are  frankly  non-moral  and  gross  to  a  degree  unknown 
in  Homer.  Here  a  step  forward,  and  a  great  one,  is 
taken  or  chronicled. 

The  poet  wavers  as  he  looks  at  the  bad  world  he 
knows.  "Wealth  is  not  to  be  seized:  god-given  it  is 
better  far.  For  if  a  man  take  great  gain  by  the  violence 
of  his  hands,  or  plunder  it  by  the  tongue — as  often  be- 
falls when  Gain  deceiveth  the  mind  of  men,  and  Shame- 
lessness  treadeth  Shame  (Aidos)  underfoot — yet  lightly 
the  gods  abase  him  and  make  that  man's  house  decay, 
and  his  gain  attendeth  him  but  a  little  while.  He  that 
wrongeth  a  suppliant,  and  he  that  mounteth  upon  his 
brother's  bed,  and  he  that  in  his  foolishness  sinneth 
against  fatherless  children,  and  he  that  chideth  an  aged 
parent  on  the  evil  threshold  of  old  age  with  harsh  words 
— it  is  all  one.  Against  him  surely  Zeus  is  angry,  and 
in  the  end  for  his  unjust  deeds  layeth  upon  him  a  stern 
recompense."  1T  Conversely  for  those  who  deal  justly 
by  strangers  and  citizens,  Zeus  sends  peace  "the  nurse  of 
children";  they  know  not  famine;  the  earth  beareth 
them  much  livelihood,  acorns  on  the  oak  and  bees  within 
it,  sheep  heavy  with  wool,  children  like  their  parents, 
"nor  do  they  go  on  ships." 18  Wherefore,  continues 
Hesiod,  "with  all  thy  might  do  sacrifice  to  the  deathless 
gods,  in  holy  wise  and  purely,  and  burn  glorious  meat- 
offerings withal,  and  at  other  times  propitiate  them  with 
libations  and  with  incense,  both  when  thou  liest  down 
and  when  the  holy  daylight  cometh,  that  they  may  have 
to  thee  a  gracious  heart  and  mind,  that  thou  mayest 
buy  a  lot  of  another,  not  another  thine."  19  The  whole 
passage  is  fiercely  attacked  by  Plato20 — "the  noble 

17  Works  and  Days,  320-334. 

18  Works  and  Days,  225-237. 

19  Works  and  Days,  336-341. 

20  Rep.  363. 


BEGINNINGS  OF  GREEK  CRITICISM        83 

Hesiod!"  he  exclaims  with  contempt;  but  Xenophon 
says  that  the  first  line  was  a  favourite  quotation  with 
Socrates.21  But  after  all,  Hesiod  is  not  sure.  Things 
go  from  bad  to  worse;  he  lives  in  the  iron  age;  there  is 
no  loyalty  left,  no  truth,  no  honour  for  the  aged  nor 
respect  for  the  guest ;  and  evil  ways  are  growing.  "Then 
shall  Shame  (Aidos)  and  Awe  (Nemesis)  veil  their  fair 
faces  with  their  white  robes,  and  depart  from  the  wide- 
wayed  Earth  unto  Olympus  to  join  the  company  of  the 
Immortals."  22 

After  Hesiod,  though  how  long  after  him  I  do  not 
guess,  came  the  poets  of  the  seventh  and  sixth  centuries 
B.C.  They  represent  something  quite  different  from 
either  Homer  or  Hesiod.  If  Homer  wrote  for  princes 
and  Hesiod  for  peasants,  these  men  and  women  wrote 
for  themselves  and  of  themselves,  individualists  all  of 
them,  self-conscious,  restless,  reflective,  Greek,  and  more 
like  the  later  Greeks  than  their  two  great  predecessors. 
Few  poets  could  be  more  personal  than  Archilochus  and 
Sappho.  "Soul,  my  soul,  with  troubles  invisible  surg- 
ing," begins  a  fragment  of  Archilochus;  and  it  was  the 
legend  of  antiquity  that  the  poet  "battened  on  hatreds,"  2a 
trouble  at  Paros,  trouble  at  Thasos,  trouble  with  the 
father-in-law-to-be.  Of  Sappho's  two  short  poems — the 
three  stanzas  of  passion  translated  by  Catullus  and  the 
ode  to  Aphrodite — I  need  not  speak;  though  the  latter 
seems  to  me  less  of  a  religious  character  than  some  would 
have  it — splendid,  but  hardly  piety.  Theognis  writes  of 
the  political  changes  of  Megara,  moving  about  in  worlds 
not  realised :  "Kyrnos,  this  city  is  still  a  city,  but  the  folk 
are  other  folk,  who  knew  not  aforetime  justice  nor  law, 
but  wore  about  their  flanks  skins  of  goats,  and  lived  with- 
out this  city  like  the  stags;  and  now  they  are  the  gentle- 

21  Xenophon,  Mem.  i.  3,  a. 

22  Works  and  Days,   174-201. 

23  Pindar,  Pyth,  li.  54. 


84.  PROGRESS  IN  RELIGION 

folk;  and  the  old  highborn  are  base."24  "O  my  soul," 
he  cries,  "amid  all  thy  friends  show  a  nature  of  many 
hues.  Have  the  mind  of  the  folded  polypus,  who  on  his 
rock,  wherever  he  cling,  is  even  such  to  see"  (213  ff.). 
So  far  away  are  the  days  when  Odysseus  could  chide 
Thersites  and  smite  him.25  We  have  to  deal  with  men 
thinking  their  own  thoughts,  wondering  what  traditions 
will  hold,  and  doubting  of  all.  The  times  are  times  of 
question  and  movement. 

In  such  times  men  think  of  the  gods  in  new  ways — 
they  handle  them  more  brusquely,  they  make  peace  with 
them  more  abjectly.  Life  for  Homer's  heroes  was  so 
good  that  the  best  life  in  Hades  was  incomparably  worse 
than  the  meanest  above  ground;  but  life  is  not  so  good 
now.  The  gods  leave  everything  in  confusion.  "Dear 
Zeus,"  cries  Theognis,  "I  marvel  at  thee.  Thou  art 
King  of  all;  thou  hast  honour  and  great  power;  thou 
knowest  well  the  mind  and  thought  of  every  man;  and 
thy  power  is  supreme  over  all,  O  King !  How  then,  Son 
of  Cronos,  doth  thy  mind  endure  to  have  wicked  men  and 
the  just  under  one  fate  (/io/pfl),  whether  a  man's  mind 
be  turned  to  self-rule,  or  to  insolence,  as  they  trust  in 
unrighteousness?  Neither  is  any  distinction  made  by 
god  for  mortal;  nor  a  road,  whereby  if  a  man  travel, 
he  may  please  the  Immortals."  26  "Father  Zeus,  would 
it  might  be  the  pleasure  of  the  gods  that  insolence  de- 
light the  wicked!  And  would  that  this  too  were  their 
pleasure;  that  whoso  contrived  hard  deeds  in  his  mind 
and  heart,  recking  nought  of  the  gods,  himself  should 
pay  again  for  his  evil  deeds,  nor  the  follies  of  the  father 
be  thereafter  a  curse  to  the  children!  and  would  that  the 
children  of  an  unjust  father,  who  think  justice  and  do 
it,  regarding  thy  wrath,  O  Son  of  Cronos,  and  from 

24  Theognis,  53  ff. 

25  Iliad,    ii.    245,    263. 

26  Theognis,    373  ff. 


BEGINNINGS  OF  GREEK  CRITICISM        85 

childhood  love  justice  amid  the  citizens,  should  not  pay 
for  the  sin  of  their  fathers !"  27  Dr.  Adam  compares  the 
striking  passage  where  Jeremiah  puts  in  his  way,  more 
piously  but  no  less  insistently,  the  same  question: 
"Righteous  art  thou,  O  Lord  .  .  .  yet  would  I  reason 
the  cause  with  thee.  Wherefore  doth  the  way  of  the 
wicked  prosper?"  *8  The  answer,  toward  which  Jeremiah 
led  the  way  for  Israel,  was  not  that  given  by  Greek 
thinkers. 

But  there  are  pious  souls  who  dread  to  challenge  the 
gods  with  such  questions,  but  who  feel  the  questions  none 
the  less,  and  go  about  getting  an  answer  in  another  way. 
They  will  surrender,  and  look  again  into  that  dark  world 
which  interested  Homer  so  little.  There  had  been  those 
who  maintained  that  justice  is  done,  who  did  not  feel 
the  distinction  that  Theognis  draws  between  the  sinner 
and  his  kin. 

Solon,  traveller,  poet  and  legislator,  had  dealt  sturdily 
with  the  problem  in  lines  of  real  beauty.  Judgment 
comes  like  a  devouring  flame  from  a  little  fire:  "Zeus 
seeth  the  end  of  all  things;  and  on  a  sudden,  as  a  wind 
in  spring  quickly  scatters  the  clouds,  stirs  the  depths  of 
the  barren  wave-driven  sea,  and  over  the  wheatlands  lays 
waste  the  fair  work  of  men,  and  cometh  to  the  high 
heaven,  the  abode  of  the  gods,  and  makes  the  clear  sky 
to  be  seen,  and  the  might  of  the  sun  shines  forth  over 
the  boundless  land,  beautiful,  nor  is  there  a  cloud  left 
to  behold;  even  so  is  the  vengeance  of  Zeus,  nor  is  he, 
like  a  mortal  man,  quick  to  anger  at  every  deed.  But 
never  doth  it  for  ever  escape  his  notice,  who  hath  a  sin- 
ful soul,  and  surely  at  the  end  it  appeareth.  One  payeth 
forthwith,  another  thereafter;  and  if  themselves  escape, 
if  the  doom  of  the  gods  light  not  upon  them,  yet  it 
cometh  none  the  less,  and  their  children  pay  for  their 

27  Theognis,  731  8.  28  Jer.  xiL  i. 


86  PROGRESS  IN  RELIGION 

deeds,  or  their  race  after  them."  29  That  had  satisfied 
Solon,  but  it  does  not  satisfy  Theognis.  The  matter 
must  be  carried  further. 

But  before  we  go  on,  one  or  two  points  should  be 
noted.  The  individual  has  come  to  be  himself,  and,  as 
already  suggested,  his  children  are  individuals;  the 
family  has  ceased  to  be  a  unit;  it  is  on  its  way  to  mod- 
ernity. Behind  such  views  as  Solon's,  which  we  also 
find  in  some  of  the  Hebrew  psalms,  was  a  long  tradition, 
dim  with  age  and  soon  to  die — that  ancestors  and 
descendants  are  one — that  the  living  and  the  dead  are 
not  without  influences  on  one  another;  the  old  worship 
of  ancestors  may  have  gone,  but  something  is  left  that 
proclaims  the  family  to  be  an  integer,  and  makes  jus- 
tice executed  on  the  grandson  balance  the  sin  of  the 
grandfather.  This  idea  died  slowly,  if  it  ever  quite  died. 
Perhaps  it  is  truer  to  say  that  ideas  have  ghosts  that 
haunt  the  minds  of  mankind — intangible  as  the  ghost  of 
Patroclus  or  of  Hamlet's  father,  yet  not  without  power. 
But  by  the  end  of  our  long  period  when  Theognis  lived 
each  man  is  himself;  he  must  be  rewarded  or  punished, 
himself  and  not  another.  Nothing  else  would  be  justice. 
This  is  a  new  phase  of  the  long-growing  demand  for 
morality  in  the  gods  and  in  men.  What  we  have  noticed 
from  time  to  time  already,  assails  us  again  here  in  the 
unhappy  complaints  of  Theognis — that  emphasis  on  per- 
sonality and  morality  which  makes  for  Progress  in 
Religion. 

Let  us  turn  now  to  the  god  to  whom  Theognis  ad- 
dressed his  complaint.  It  is  still  Zeus — the  Zeus  of 
Homer,  of  Hesiod  and  of  Solon.  But,  generally,  it  is 
remarked  in  the  lyric  poets  that  Zeus  is  gaining  a  greater 
ascendency.  We  have  only  fragments  to  deal  with,  so 
that  our  negative  statements  will  hardly  be  as  secure  as 

2»  Solon,  iv.    12   (4),   14  ff.    (Bergk). 


BEGINNINGS  OF  GREEK  CRITICISM        87 

what  we  can  say  positively.  The  negative  first,  then. 
There  is  an  absence  of  reference  in  our  fragments  to  the 
old  scandals  of  Olympus,  a  refraining  from  some  of  the 
things  said  to  Zeus  and  about  him  in  the  Homeric  poems. 
On  the  positive  side,  while  the  other  gods  survived,  while, 
as  we  know  from  other  sources,  they  were  worshipped, 
Zeus  is  gaining  at  their  expense.  When  a  man  questions, 
it  is  the  government  of  Zeus  that  he  questions.  Zeus 
is  hardly  so  personal  as  he  was  in  Homer;  he  is  more 
like  Providence,  or  Ultimate  Justice,  or  the  power  behind 
nature — all  of  which  he  became  in  time  under  Stoic 
teaching.  The  Greeks  are  still  a  long  way  from 
Monotheism,  but  the  old  society  of  heaven  is  breaking 
up.  Local  gods  and  local  goddesses — and  one  great  god 
over  all ;  this  with  some  reservations,  when  one  thinks  of 
corn  and  crop  and  the  world  of  the  dead,  seems  the  pic- 
ture of  heaven  that  the  period  gives  us. 

Two  points,  then,  are  outstanding.  Divine  Justice  and 
Monotheism  are  not  yet  established,  but  in  one  way  and 
another  men  are  beginning  to  ask  for  them;  in  the  one 
case  they  are  quite  clear  in  their  feelings,  that  it  is  im- 
perative to  show  the  heavens  more  just.  In  the  other, 
an  instinct,  not  yet  thought-out,  an  instinct  which 
scholars  tell  us  was  in  Israel  as  far  back  as  our  records 
will  reliably  take  us — an  instinct  which  Tertullian  seized 
upon  as  a  witness  to  the  soul  being  by  nature  Christian, 
which  Muhammad  found  even  among  heathen  Arabs — 
is  quietly  impelling  men  to  think  in  the  terms  of  a  single 
supreme  god.  Fear,  tradition,  and  the  sense  of  solitude 
compel  them  to  supplement  that  one  god;  but,  when  we 
survey  from  a  distance  the  completed  story  of  Greek 
thought,  we  recognise  here  the  beginnings  of  Mono- 
theism. But  there  is  another  impulse,  of  which  we  have 
so  far  had  little  evidence  in  what  is  left  us  of  early  Greek 
literature. 


38  PROGRESS  IN  RELIGION 

Men  ask  for  Justice  in  God;  and  an  instinct,  which 
works  more  slowly,  drives  them  to  conceive  of  him  as 
One.  But  what  St.  Augustine  summed  up  in  his  most 
famous  sentence  has  plenty  of  evidence  outside  the  range 
of  Christian  experience  as  well  as  within  it.  "Thou 
hast  made  us  for  thyself,  and  our  heart  knows  no  rest 
until  it  rests  in  Thee."  80  The  thought  is  not  one  that 
seems  to  fit  in  with  Homer  or  the  Greek  philosophers  of  • 
the  sixth  century  B.C.,  but  it  is  quite  clear  that  the  impulse 
to  seek  peace  with  heaven,  to  find  some  rest  for  the  heart 
on  the  basis  of  some  relation  with  the  gods,  was  powerful 
in  the  centuries  under  our  present  survey.  Primus  in 
orbe  deos  fecit  timor,  said  Statius;31  but,  even  if  fear 
was  the  first  factor,  or  even  the  only  one,  that  drove  men 
into  religious  thought  and  rite,  fear  was  allayed  by  an 
effective  relation  with  the  gods.  If  the  right  prayer  were 
said,  if  the  right  offering  were  made,  the  god  would  take 
the  fear  out  of  the  human  heart,  either  by  going  away 
himself  or  by  helping  the  man  to  overcome  it;  and, 
whichever  was  the  way,  it  was  managed  by  intercourse; 
and  that  depended  on  the  assurance  that  god  and  man 
understand  each  other. 

When  we  were  considering  the  Homeric  gods,  we  saw 
how  natural  and  how  inevitable  is  the  movement  to 
Anthropomorphism.  The  gods  must  be  rational  and  in- 
telligible, must  be  interpretable  in  human  terms.  But 
they  must  also  be  just  in  their  dealings  with  men,  and 
moral  and  perhaps  dignified  in  their  relations  with  one 
another.  And  here  the  gods  of  the  Iliad  and  the  Odyssey 
might  seem  defective  to  people  whose  minds  moved 
more  slowly  than  Homer's,  who  were  framed  (let  us 
say)  in  a  more  pious  mould.  Athene,  Apollo  and  others 
of  them  are  too  like  the  Greek  tyrant;  intelligible  enough, 

30  Augustine,  Confessions,   i,   i. 

idj  iii.  661;  Petronius  said  it  before  him,  fragm.  27    (Bucheler). 


BEGINNINGS  OF  GREEK  CRITICISM        89 

they  are,  however,  "outside  the  ordinary  thoughts,"  *2 
one  of  which  is  the  sense  of  responsibility.  So,  without 
renouncing  these  brilliant  creatures,  men  turned  else- 
where when  they  wanted  gods  who  took  a  quieter  view 
of  life.  It  may  not  be  quite  the  whole  story,  to  say  that 
they  turned  to  gods  less  completely  humanised. 

Demeter  and  Dionysos  had  escaped  the  touch  of 
Homer's  imagination,  and  remained  indeed  less  human, 
but  what  gave  them  their  significance  was  something  else 
— something  about  each  of  them  that  remained  unex- 
plained. Demeter  was  kind  and  good,  the  giver  of  crops 
and  of  life,  the  giver  of  laws;  her  ways  were  in  the  main 
very  calculable;  but  her  power  was  one  of  the  most  mys- 
terious things  on  earth.  Why  should  grain  grow  by 
being  buried?  Why  should  anything  grow?  How  does 
it  ?  Dionysos  is  different.  How  far  he  is  to  be  regarded 
as  initially  a  god  of  vegetation  or  of  the  vine,  I  do  not 
know.  I  lean  to  the  idea  that  he  owed  much  of  his  sig- 
nificance to  the  play  of  primitive  Psychology  upon  psy- 
chopathic phenomena,  which  it  could  not  understand. 

The  Eleusinian  Mysteries  have  piqued  the  curiosity 
both  of  ancient  worshippers  and  modern  archaeologists; 
and  it  is  probable  that  if  we  could  have  a  complete  his- 
tory of  their  origin  and  development,  let  us  say  from 
Demeter  to  Justinian,  we  should  have  a  complete  revela- 
tion of  everything  that  stirred  in  Greek  religion.  For 
we  have  again  to  remind  ourselves  at  this  point  that 
religion  is  never  quite  static.  No  religion  ever  was 
semper  eadem.  Every  religion  is  always  being  re- 
translated, re-interpreted.  Even  the  most  orthodox 
speak  the  dialect  of  their  day;  and,  as  they  of  all  people 
are  least  alive  to  the  strange  ways  of  words,  they  think 
in  the  dialect  of  their  day  and  never  realise  that  they 
are  doing  it ;  so  they  also  re-translate  their  faith.  Trans- 

st  Herodotus,  iii.  80. 


90  PROGRESS  IN  RELIGION 

lation  never  leaves  an  idea  unchanged ;  least  of  all  when 
it  is  unconscious  translation. 

For  us  the  definite  history  of  Eleusis  begins  with  the 
so-called  Homeric  Hymn  to  Demeter,  which  is  not  from 
the  immortal  hand  and  eye  that  framed  the  Odyssey. 
Thucydides  thought,  or  assumed,  with  the  men  of  his 
day  that  Homer  wrote  the  hymns,  but  the  great  Homeric 
scholars  of  Alexandria  did  not.33  The  hymn  to  Demeter 
is  generally  allowed  to  belong  to  the  beginning  of  the 
sixth  century  B.C.  The  rest  of  our  evidence  is  later, 
some  of  it  very  late  indeed,  and,  what  is  worse,  of  un- 
certain date.  If  our  business  were  to  write  the  history 
of  Eleusinian  faith  and  practice,  it  would  be  a  long  and 
difficult  task  to  trace  the  growth  of  the  mass  of  myth, 
legend  and  fable,  the  development  of  ritual  and  the 
transmutation  of  ideas  associated  with  the  mysteries,  and 
to  find  the  sources  Thracian,  Egyptian  or  Philosophic 
from  which  those  ideas  were  reinforced.  But  our  task 
is  much  simpler.  The  hymn  tells  us  a  good  deal  about 
the  religion  at  the  date  when  it  was  composed — a  good 
deal  but  not  all.  Like  other  writers  of  hymns,  the  author, 
and  perhaps  his  revisers,  chose  what  he  would  emphasise, 
and  assumed  that  those  who  would  use  the  hymn  knew 
more  than  he  wrote,  e.g.,  about  the  ritual.  They  had  the 
advantage  of  us  there;  but  history,  archaeology,  and 
anthropology  have  given  the  modern  student  data  and 
criteria  that  the  worshippers  hardly  wanted.  It  seems 
generally  agreed  that  behind  the  hymn,  a  long  way  per- 
haps behind  it,  was  a  ritual  on  the  border-line  between 
Magic  and  Religion — a  ritual  which  would  promote  the 
growth  and  health  of  crops.  Some  vague  daemon  of 
vegetation  was  involved — daemon  or  daemons,  but  the 
matter  could  not  be  left  there.  The  ritual  needed  ex- 

33  Andrew    Lang,   Homeric   Hymns,    pp.    3,   4.      Allen    and    Sikes,    Homeric 
Hymns,  p.  54. 


BEGINNINGS  OF  GREEK  CRITICISM        91 

planation,  and  an  anthropomorphising  instinct  played 
upon  the  daemon  or  daemons;  and  out  of  the  double 
process  came  the  beautiful  myth  of  Demeter  and  Perse- 
phone, which  at  last  the  hymn  gives  us  with  a  new  beauty 
and  tenderness  of  its  own,  fixing  its  outline  and  its  details 
and  making  it  immortal,  not  without  some  hint  of  kin- 
ship with  Homer  and  the  gods  that  Homer  drew.  Some- 
thing more  followed,  which  is  briefly  told  us  at  the  end 
of  the  Hymn. 

When  the  goddess  had  sent  up  the  grain  from  the 
rich  glebe,  and  the  wide  earth  was  heavy  with  leaves 
and  flowers,  she  showed  unto  Triptolemus  and  Diocles 
the  charioteer  and  mighty  Eumolpus  and  Celeos,  leader 
of  the  people,  "the  manner  of  her  rites,  and  taught  them 
her  holy  mysteries,  which  none  may  violate,  or  search 
into,  or  noise  abroad,  for  the  great  curse  from  the  gods 
restrains  the  voice.  Happy  is  he  among  deathly  men 
who  hath  beheld  these  things!  and  he  that  is  uninitiate, 
and  hath  no  lot  in  them,  hath  never  equal  lot  in  death 
beneath  the  murky  gloom."  34 

The  corn  ritual,  the  corn  daemon,  Demeter  the  Mother, 
Persephone  and  the  pomegranate — and  then  Immortality 
and  Joy  for  the  initiate.  Even  if,  with  Sir  James  Frazer, 
we  were  to  say  Demeter  began  as  a  pig — and  he  prefers 
a  lowly  origin  for  gods,  as  some  people  do  for  self-made 
men,  though  for  the  opposite  reason — we  have  left  the 
pig  a  long  way  behind;  and  Mr.  Andrew  Lang  tells  us 
it  was  never  on  the  jnain  track  at  all.85  We  have  reached 
a  point  at  which  men  are  definitely  fixing  their  eyes  and 
their  attention  upon  Eternity,  and  a  differentiated  Eter- 
nity— a  religion  intensely  personal.  It  is  not  suggested 
by  the  poet  that  a  man's  moral  character  will  bear  directly 
on  his  immortal  life;  that  seems  to  have  been  a  gap  in 

34  Lang's  translation. 

35  Homeric  Hymns,  Intr.,  pp.   63-66. 


92  PROGRESS  IN  RELIGION 

the  teaching  of  the  mysteries  throughout.  The  indignant 
question  of  the  Cynic  philosopher  remains:  "Shall 
Pataikion  the  brigand,  because  he  was  initiated,  fare 
better  after  death  than  Epameinondas  ?"  36  It  is  plain 
enough  that  the  priests  of  the  mysteries  made  little  in- 
quiry as  to  the  character  of  those  they  initiated.  Mr. 
Lang  would  not  allow  the  view  of  Lobeck  that  there  was 
no  ethical  teaching  in  the  mysteries;  he  urged  that  every- 
where primitive  peoples  have  associated  moral  instruction 
with  mummeries  and  rituals,  and  that  this  association 
may  have  survived.  "Holy"  and  "pure"  are  words  with 
long  and  strange  histories,  and  their  exact  meaning  at 
any  stage  must  be  learnt  before  we  can  do  much  with 
them.  In  any  case  the  strongest  moral  impulses  have 
not  been  given  to  mankind  by  the  guardians  of  ritual 
and  sacrament;  they  have  come  from  without;  that  at 
all  events  is  true  in  Greece.  Little  can  be  added  to  what 
Aristotle  says:  "The  initiated  learned  nothing  precisely, 
but  they  received  impressions  and  were  put  into  a  certain 
frame  of  mind,  for  which  they  had  been  prepared" — 
and  evermore,"  adds  Omar, 

"Came  out  by  that  same  door  where  in  I  went." 

As  we  saw  before,  however,  moral  effect  is  sometimes 
not  quite  to  be  measured  by  moral  purpose,  and  what- 
ever the  purpose  of  the  writer  of  the  Hymn  to  Demeter, 
the  poem  must  have  contributed  to  the  education  of 
Greece  in  some  of  the  things  that  matter  most. 

There  were  other  mystery  religions  in  Greece,  and 
one  of  the  most  important  movements  of  Greek  religious 
thought  now  demands  our  attention.  But  one  or  two 
points  may  be  recalled,  and  perhaps  developed,  first.  We 
have  seen  the  growing  self-consciousness  of  the  Hellen 

86  Diogenes  Laertiut,  vi.  39. 


BEGINNINGS  OF  GREEK  CRITICISM        93 

as  the  world  about  him  becomes  more  and  more  complex 
and  unintelligible,  and  we  must  not  omit  to  notice  that 
the  Hymn  to  Demeter,  in  that  epilogue  about  the  world 
beyond,  recognises  the  individual  and  his  personal  out- 
look on  religion  in  a  way  that  is  almost  modern.  A  man 
chose  to  be  initiated,  or  remained  uninitiated  by  choice.31 
In  other  words,  a  change  has  come  in  religion,  though  its 
implications  are  not  broadly  recognised  as  yet.  Once 
to  share  in  a  cult  had  implied  a  blood  relation  (real  or 
presumed)  of  the  whole  tribal  circle  worshipping,  and 
the  possession  of  the  god  by  the  tribe  or  group  of  tribes 
— he  was  "our  god" ;  or  the  cult  was  a  local  one  jealously 
guarded;  and  in  any  case  everybody  belonging  to  the 
tribe,  or  the  group  of  natives  of  the  place,  was  ipso  facto 
a  subject  for  initiation  and  was  initiated.  But  the  sixth 
century  bears  witness  to  an  innovation — choice  in  re- 
ligion; and  this  carries  with  it,  in  germ,  a  good  deal — 
the  weighing  of  the  claims  of  conscience,  heart,  tradition 
and  philosophy,  and  the  habit  of  reflection  in  religion, 
of  speculation.  Eleusis,  further,  was  practically  interna- 
tional, or  became  so.  "Demeter,"  writes  Isocrates,38 
about  385  B.C.,  "came  to  the  country  and  gave  two  gifts, 
the  greatest  of  gifts — the  crops  which  have  saved  us 
from  the  life  of  mere  animals,  and  the  rite,  whereof  who 
partake  have  sweeter  hopes  for  the  end  of  life  and  for 
all  time ;  and  our  city  in  piety  to  god  and  man,  grudged 
not  but  gave  to  all  what  she  had  received."  He  implies 
a  tradition  dating  from  the  incorporation  of  Eleusis  in 
Attica  perhaps  in  the  seventh  century,  and  the  opening 
of  the  rites  to  all  Athenians.  A  universal  religion,  then, 
is  in  sight,  and  one  in  which  the  individual  speaks  the 
decisive  word — he  will,  or  he  will  not,  have  it.  Mean- 
time, the  normal  and  established  religions  or  cults  are 

87  F.  B.  Jevons,  History  of  Religion,  p.  328. 

38  Panegyric,  xxviii.;  Jevons,  Htstory  of  Religion,  p.   359. 


94  PROGRESS  IN  RELIGION 

not  felt  by  their  maintainers  to  be  in  any  way  challenged 
by  the  new  development.  This  was  partly  because 
polytheism  never  is  endangered  by  the  acceptance  of  an 
extra  god,  and  partly  because  there  was  really  nothing 
revolutionary  about  the  ceremonies  at  Eleusis;  all  was 
old  and  traditional,  as  the  goddess  had  given  it;  there 
could  be  no  harm  in  it.  The  dangers  for  a  local  religion 
that  we  now  see  to  be  involved  in  a  universal  religion, 
for  a  religion  wholly  tribal  in  one  where  the  individual 
chooses,  were  not  obvious  at  the  stage  reached;  indeed, 
they  never  were  very  serious  till  the  universal  religion 
became  definitely  monotheistic.  India  has  assimilated  or 
tolerated  every  religion  except  Islam  and  Protestantism. 
Orphism  89  is  the  greatest  religious  movement  of  the 
age  under  our  consideration.  It  is  a  complex  of  many 
elements,  assimilating  ideas  that  perhaps  had  little  to  do 
with  it  in  its  earliest  form,  and  adapting  itself  to  them. 
The  tradition  was  that  it  began  in  Thrace,  among  com- 
munities admittedly  savage;  and  some  of  its  features 
confirm  this.  The  tearing  to  pieces  of  living  animals  was 
a  rite  of  several  primitive  religions,  notably  among  the 
Semites;  it  is  found  to-day  among  Indians  in  British 
Columbia.40  To  the  Greeks  this  was  startling  enough, 
and  not  less  were  the  other  accompaniments  of  the  re- 
ligion, its  influence  upon  women,  who  left  their  homes, 
ranged  the  hills,  cried  their  god's  name,  and  showed  a 
heightening  of  muscular  strength  along  with  trance  and 
hallucination — symptoms  which  we  group  to-day  as  psy- 
chopathic and  consider  to  be  of  no  intellectual  or  re- 
ligious value.  In  those  days  the  phenomena  had,  as  they 
have  elsewhere  to-day,  only  one  explanation — viz.  god- 
possession.  They  were  evidence  of  the  presence  of  a  god 

39  See  John   Burnet,   Greek  Philosophy,   pp.   85  f . ;    Bury,    Greek  History,  L 
pp.  316-318. 

40  Or  perhaps  yesterday;  my  statement  rests  on  a  paragraph   in  a  Kingston, 
Ontario,  paper  in  the  autumn  of   1896.     The  animal  used  by  the  Indians  was 
a  dog. 


BEGINNINGS  OF  GREEK  CRITICISM         95 

and  of  his  effectual  union  with  the  natures  of  the  persons 
affected.41  There  can  be  little  doubt  that  the  phenomena 
so  explained  were  the  first  cause  of  the  great  spread  of 
Orphism.  The  modern  psychologist  tells  us  how  such 
waves  of  impulsive  social  action  originate  among  people 
who  have  least  inhibitory  control,  and  how  they  spread 
by  imitation,  intensifying  as  they  go.  The  ancient  ex- 
planation undoubtedly  contributed  to  the  spread,  and  the 
contagion  swept  all  over  Greece,  so  irresistibly  that  the 
older  shrines  had  to  recognise  the  new  god,  who  proved 
himself  of  such  power.  Apollo  admitted  his  "brother" 
to  Delphi;  and  he  found  a  place  at  Eleusis,  at  Athens, 
at  S  icy  on. 

Then  fresh  elements  appear,  whether  due  to  another 
movement  or  not,  or  to  a  teacher  identifiable  with 
Orpheus ;  and  the  religion,  which  began  with  psychopathic 
disturbances,  is  equipped  with  myths,  a  theology,  a  phi- 
losophy of  the  soul  and  its  origin  and  destiny,  a  system 
of  life  and  ritual  a  good  deal  quieter  than  the  original 
one,  and  an  extensive  literature.42  Here  again  it  is  hard 
to  make  out  an  order  of  events;  the  Orphists  put  Or- 
pheus earlier  than  Homer,  which  Herodotus  rightly  would 
not  believe.43  Among  them  they  developed  a  Cosmogony, 
not  free  from  variants;44  they  told,  for  instance,  how 
Ocean  first  married  Tethys  his  sister  and  begot  various 
gods,  how  Dionysus-Zagreus,  the  child-god,  was  muti- 
lated and  devoured  by  the  Titans,  but  was  rescued  by 
Athene  and  swallowed  by  Zeus  to  re-appear  as  the  new 
Dionysus,  while  from  the  ashes,  to  which  the  Titans  were 
reduced  by  a  thunderbolt,  sprang  man,  of  twofold  nature, 
god  and  Titan,  an  uneasy  union  of  good  and  evil.  An- 
other similar  myth  tells  how  Zeus  swallowed  Phanes,  in 

41  Even  this  vague  statement  may  be  too   precise.     "Union"   and   "nature" 
are  words  that  raise  many  questions. 

42  The   innumerable   books,    cf.    Euripides,    Hipp.    954:    Plato,    Rep.    364E. 

43  Herodotus,  ii.  S5- 

44  Dieterich,  Abraxas,  I  9,  pp.  126-135. 


96  PROGRESS  IN  RELIGION 

whom,  as  the  offspring  of  the  world-egg,  were  all  seeds 
or  potencies;  and  how,  as  a  result,  sky,  sea,  earth,  ocean, 
Tartarus,  rivers,  gods  and  goddesses,  all  that  was  or 
would  be  was  in  the  belly  of  Zeus,  in  confusion.45  The 
soul,  so  the  Orphics  taught  more  certainly,  was  not  at 
home  but  in  prison  in  the  body,  buried  as  it  were  (acdfjia, 
arina),  but  desirous  of  freedom.46  Sin  before  birth 
sent  it  there,  for  the  transmigration  of  an  immortal  soul 
was  among  their  tenets.  Herodotus  (ii.  123)  attributes 
to  the  Egyptians  the  credit  of  first  teaching  the  immor- 
tality of  the  soul;  and  perhaps  the  doctrine  was  only  in- 
corporated in  Orphism  after  Pythagoras.  It  seems  that 
the  full  Egyptian  doctrine  differed  in  essential  particulars 
from  the  Orphic;  Egypt  appears  not  to  have  taught 
transmigration ;  nor  is  the  Orphic  doctrine  precisely  what 
we  find  in  Hinduism.  Orphism  taught  a  possibility  of 
escape  on  other  lines  than  Ramanuja's. 

If  our  ancient  evidence  is  indistinct  as  to  dates  and 
origins,  a  series  of  discoveries  of  small  gold  tablets  buried 
.with  the  dead  gives  us  a  sure  foothold.  In  one  the  soul 
of  the  dead  is  bidden  (in  Greek  hexameters)  to  say:  "I 
am  a  child  of  Earth  and  of  Starry  Heaven;  but  my  race 
is  of  Heaven.  This  ye  know  yourselves.  And  lo,  I  am 
parched  with  thirst  and  I  perish.  Give  me  quickly  the 
cold  water  flowing  forth  from  the  Lake  of  Memory."  *7 
In  another,  he  says : — 

"Out  of  the  pure  I  come,  Pure  Queen  of  them  below, 
Eukles  and  Eubouleus  and  the  other  Gods  Immortal, 
But  I  also  avow  me  that  I  am  of  your  blessed  race 
But  Fate  laid  me  low  and  the  other  Gods  Immortal, 

[Some  words  omitted  by  )  starflung  thunderbolt,  [accusative] 
the  Greek  engraver]   ) 

45  Cf.    Eugen    Abel,    fr.    liii.    121,    122,    123,    quoted    by    Adam,    Religious 
Teachers,    p.    96.      Cf.    Aristophanes,    Birds,    693;    Plato,    Timaeus,    4oD;    and 
see  passages  set  out  in  Diels,  Vorsokratiker,  vol.  ii.  66B. 

46  A  favourite  idea  with  Plato. 

47  J.    E.    Harrison,   Prolegomena,   pp.    574   and    586.     Diels,   Fragmente   der 
Vorsokratiker,  vol.  ii.  No.  66,  p.  480. 


BEGINNINGS  OF  GREEK  CRITICISM        97 

I  have  flown  out  of  the  sorrowful  weary  wheel. 

I  have  passed  with  eager  feet  to  the  Circle  desired. 

I  have  sunk  beneath  the  bosom  of  Despoina,  Queen  of  the 

underworld. 

I  have  passed  with  eager  feet  from  the  Circle  desired. 
Happy  and  Blessed  One,  thou  shalt  be  god  instead  of  mortal. 
A  kid  I  have  fallen  into  milk." 

Eusebius,  in  his  Preparation  of  the  Gospel,  and  some 
other  writers  quote  a  poem  of  Orpheus,48  which,  of  what- 
ever date,  gives  a  striking  portrayal  of  Zeus.  "Zeus  was 
the  first,  Zeus  last,  lord  of  the  thunder ;  Zeus  head,  Zeus 
midst49  From  Zeus  all  things  are  made,  Zeus  was  male, 
Zeus  was  the  immortal  feminine;  Zeus  foundation  of 
earth  and  of  the  starry  sky;  Zeus  breath  of  the  winds, 
Zeus  rushing  of  tireless  fire;  Zeus  root  of  the  sea;  Zeus 
the  sun  and  the  moon;  Zeus  king;  Zeus  himself  source 
of  all  beginnings.  One  might,  one  daimon  was  he,  great 
leader  of  all,  one  royal  body,  wherein  all  these  revolve, 
fire  and  water  and  earth  and  aether,  night  and  day.  And 
Wisdom,  first  begetter,  and  Eros  manifold  of  delight. 
For  all  these  things  lie  in  the  mighty  body  of  Zeus"; 
and  so  forth. 

Let  us  sum  up  what  we  have  so  far  gathered,  and 
ignore  the  question  as  to  the  part  of  Pythagoras  in 
Orphism.  Here  is  a  religion  linked  with  most  primitive 
rites  and  witnessed  to  by  phenomena  quite  inexplicable 
till  explained  by  modern  Psychology — a  religion  which 
teaches  a  thorough-going  pantheism,  the  divine  origin  of 
the  soul  and  its  immortality  and  deliverance.  To  find  a 
parallel  we  must,  I  think,  go  to  Hinduism.  Orpheus, 
whoever  he  was — Orphism  has,  left  the  Homeric  Zeus 
with  his  golden  chain  on  his  Olympus,  and  teaches  an- 
other more  wonderful,  but  markedly  less  personal. 

48  Abel,  Orphica,  it.  123;  Praep.  Ev.  Hi.  9. 

49  The  form  of  the  Greek  appears  to  support  the  idea  that  Plato  quotes  this 
line,  Laws,   7i$E.     Cf.  Diels,   Vorsokratikcr,  ii.   66  B6. 


98  PROGRESS  IN  RELIGION 

Homer  had  said  that  the  wrath  of  Achilles  sent  many 
souls  of  heroes  to  Hades,  but  gave  themselves  to  dogs 
and  birds.  Here  the  soul  is  the  real  thing;  and  an  ex- 
planation, perhaps  more  than  one,  is  offered  of  its  situa- 
tion and  its  difficulties  in  the  body  along  with  a  clear 
promise  of  its  release.  Life  is  brought  under  the  disci- 
pline of  religion  to  this  end;  there  is  ritual,  there  is  rap- 
ture and  identification  with  the  god ;  there  is  ascetic  prac- 
tice and  abstinence  from  animal  food.  We  are  not  told 
by  the  Orphics,  as  in  India,  that  metempsychosis  is  the 
reason  for  vegetarianism ;  but  a  caustic  quatrain  directed 
by  Xenophanes  against  Pythagoras  helps  us  to  that  con- 
clusion. 

So  the  soul  is  asserting  itself;  the  immortal  personality 
of  the  man  is  getting  recognised.  God  is  somewhat 
stripped  of  his  personality,  but  there  is  a  suggestion  of 
Justice  about  what  is  left  of  him,  so  far  as  Pantheism 
allows  or  needs  him  to  be  just,  and  so  far  as  emphasis 
on  ritual  allows  a  place  for  justice.  And  the  Thracian 
stories  witness  to  the  unquestionable  reality  of  the  god 
who  inspires  the  Maenads,  and  to  an  effective  union  with 
him.  The  old  tribal  and  local  lines  of  division  are  grow- 
ing blurred,  this  religion  is  universal  and  it  gives  the 
individual  freedom  of  choice.  But  there  were  marked 
drawbacks  about  it.  It  stereotyped  the  primitive;  it  em- 
phasised the  irrational  as  the  highest  manifestation  of 
God ;  and,  whatever  it  may  say  about  purity  and  holiness, 
by  its  attention  to  taboo,  to  ritual,  to  ascetisicm  and  the 
external,  it  shifted  the  interest  of  its  worshippers  away 
from  the  moral  law  and  from  the  spiritual  side  of  life; 
and  finally,  by  its  myths  and  its  symbolism  it  militated 
against  clearness  of  thought.  There  are  those  who  hold 
that  there  was  a  danger  of  Orphism  swamping  Hellen- 
ism,50 as  Hinduism  has  swamped  and  sterilised  Indian 

60  Cf.  Bury,  Creek  History,  p.  316  f. 


BEGINNINGS  OF  GREEK  CRITICISM        99 

life  and  thought;  but  I  do  not  find  evidence  for  this. 
Orphism  re-emphasised  in  its  way  the  need  of  the  indi- 
vidual human  soul  and  its  instinct  for  God,  its  craving 
to  find  rest  in  Him — so  much  must  be  conceded — but 
there  is  the  testimony  of  Plato  and  of  the  greater  Chris- 
tian fathers  that  the  via  prima  salutis  is  in  another  direc- 
tion. 

For  the  time,  it  is  clear  that  the  set  of  opinion  was  all 
for  sacraments,  initiation  and  holiness.  There  was  no 
organised  church  or  priesthood  to  formulate  teaching,  to 
regulate  ceremony,  or  to  ordain  ministrants;  and  there 
was  an  immense  demand  for  special  intercourse  with 
heaven.  From  what  literature  we  have  that  bears  on  the 
age,  we  can  see  how  the  world  began  to  swarm  with 
priests  and  prophets,  initiating,  purifying,  and  bringing 
men  by  private  ways  to  terms  with  the  gods.  Old  rites 
were  revived,  as  happens  at  such  times;  and  often  the 
more  savage  and  primitive  they  were,  the  more  repulsive 
and  bizarre,  the  more  virtue  lay  in  them.  Many  of  them 
were  disgusting — natural  perhaps  for  the  savage;  but  the 
times  were  civilised.  Then  the  state  stepped  in,  accepted 
the  new  gods  and  the  new  notions,  the  new  individualism, 
and  controlled  the  new  rites,  as  at  Athens  the  Thes- 
mophoria  and  the  Dionysia,  and  the  ceremonies  of 
Eleusis  were  regularised  if  not  regulated  by  the  govern- 
ing powers.  It  recognized  thiasoi,  eranoi,  orgeones — 
groups  of  initiates.  In  historical  Athens  we  do  not  hear 
of  the  Thracian  psychopathic  phenomena.  But  the  state 
did  not  eliminate  what  may  be  called  the  naturalistic  ele- 
ment in  these  cults — the  filth  and  indecency.  A  state  is 
not  often  morally  ahead  of  its  citizens. 

The  criticism  came  from  elsewhere.  "If  it  were  not 
in  honour  of  Dionysus,"  says  Heraclitus,51  "that  they 
were  ordering  their  procession  and  singing  a  song  of 

51  Heraclitus,  fr.  xv.;  Diels,  Fragmenta  der  Vorsokratiker,  vol.  i.  isB.  15. 


100  PROGRESS  IN  RELIGION 

phalli  (he  is  more  explicit),  their  conduct  would  be  ut- 
terly shameless.  Hades  is  one  with  Dionysus,  for  whom 
they  go  mad  and  celebrate."  "If  they  are  gods,"  he 
asked,52  "why  do  you  mourn  for  them  as  dead?  If  you 
mourn  for  them,  count  them  no  longer  gods."  So  much 
for  living  and  dead  gods  and  men's  worship  of  them. 
Xenophanes  looked  at  the  legends — "Homer  and  Hesiod 
fastened  upon  the  gods  everything  that  is  shame  and 
blame  among  men — theft,  adultery  and  trickery." 
Xenophanes  suggested  a  question  that  went  deeper  yet — 
"The  Ethiopians  make  the  gods  flat-nosed  and  black;  the 
Thracians  make  them  grey-eyed  and  red-haired";  and 
cows  and  horses,  no  doubt,  if  they  had  hands,  would 
make  the  shapes  of  the  gods  like  their  own.  How  are 
we  to  conceive  of  God?  Certainly  not,  these  thinkers 
would  urge,  as  immoral;  certainly  not  as  asking  in- 
decency and  calling  it  worship.  The  moral  sense  of 
Greece  had  waked  and  reached  manhood.  The  story  of 
Greek  religion  shows  extreme  reluctance  to  give  up  the 
old  rites  and  the  old  myths;  it  turns  to  them  again  and 
again,  explains  them,  apologises,  allegorises,  but  in  vain. 
From  Xenophanes  and  Heraclitus  through  Plato  to  the 
Christians  the  same  indignant  reaction  is  to  be  traced 
against  associating  God  in  any  way  with  immorality, 
whatever  holy  name  it  wears. 

The  great  gain  that  the  new  philosophy  brought  to 
Greece  was  the  direct  look  at  the  world.  The  mystic's 
mind  tends  to  take  a  "knight's  move ;"  but  whatever  may 
be  allowed  in  chess,  neither  the  bodily  nor  the  spiritual 
eye  can  see  round  a  corner;  and  symbolism  is  essentially 
an  attempt  at  that.  The  mystic  sought  to  save  his  soul 
— to  be  comfortable  about  it;  but  these  great  pioneers 
sought  truth  first. 

B2  Heraclitus,  fr.    127;   Diels,  I.e.,   ia~B   127,  a  doubted   fragment. 
63  Xenophanes,  fr.   u,  16,  15;  Diels,  I.e.,  vol.  i.   nB. 


BEGINNINGS  OF  GREEK  CRITICISM       101 

It  is  wonderful  to  realize  how  great  a  world  these 
men  grasped,  over  what  a  range  of  space  and  time  their 
minds  moved.  Xenophanes  hit  upon  the  true  explanation 
of  the  fossils  in  the  Sicilian  hills;  and  Geology  may  lend 
a  steadying  hand  to  Theology.  They  meant  to  know 
and  to  understand  the  universe  taken  as  a  whole  and  as 
a  unity.  "Nature  tries  to  hide  herself"  (fr.  123);  and 
"eyes  and  ears  are  bad  witnesses  to  such  as  have  bar- 
barian souls"  (fr.  107),  said  Heraclitus.  The  harmony 
of  all  things  will  not  be  obvious;  indeed  "a  hidden  har- 
mony is  better  than  an  obvious"  (fr.  54).  But,  in  any 
case,  underlying  the  variety  of  things  is  unity;  and  they 
speculated,  with  a  boldness  amazing  then  or  at  any 
time,  as  to  what  that  unity  is.  Is  water  the  substance  of 
all  things,  or  fire,  or  the  vaguer  "infinite"?  They  ex- 
tended the  reign  of  law  to  all  phenomena.  Think  what 
a  god  the  sun  was;  think  of  the  grim,  avenging  figures 
of  the  Erinnyes  in  art  and  legend;  and  then  think  of 
this  saying  of  Heraclitus:  "The  sun  will  not  overstep 
bounds;  but,  if  he  does,  the  Erinnyes,  helpers  of  Justice, 
will  find  him"  (fr.  94).  We  are  in  another  world  from 
that  of  the  Orphic — a  world  of  larger  spaces  and  of  air 
more  open;  and,  as  the  proverb  says,  "nothing  of  all  this 
concerns  Dionysus."  Anaximander  held  that  "there  are 
created  gods,  rising  and  disappearing  at  long  intervals, 
and  that  these  are  the  innumerable  worlds."  "  Xeno- 
phanes, whose  caustic  criticism  we  have  seen  upon  the 
forms  of  his  country's  gods,  is  not  only  destructive. 
Four  short  fragments,65  perhaps  of  the  same  poem,  speak 
of  another  god  than  Greece  had  yet  adopted  or  con- 
ceived, though  we  have  had  hints  of  him. 

One  God  there  is  'mid  gods  and  man  the  greatest, 
In  form  not  like  to  mortals,  nor  in  mind; — 

B4  Cicero,  de  Nat.  Deorum,   i.  25;  Adam,  Religious  Teachers,   187. 
65  Xenophanes,  fr.  23-6. 


102  PROGRESS  IN  RELIGION 

He  is  all  eye,  all  mind,  all  hearing  he; — 
He  without  toil  rules  all  things  by  his  will; — 
Ever  unmoved,  in  one  place  he  abideth, 
Him  it  befits  not  here  and  there  to  go. 

Points  of  contact  are  noted  here  with  Orphism,  but  the 
scorn  he  poured  upon  Pythagoras  for  recognising  the 
voice  of  a  lost  friend  in  the  cry  of  a  beaten  dog  (fr.  7), 
and  his  quarrel  with  Epimenides,  the  professional  purifier 
from  Crete,  suggest  the  same  independence  of  mind  that 
we  find  in  him  throughout.  There  has  been  much  con- 
troversy about  the  phrase  "greatest  among  gods";  but 
James  Adam,  using  parallels  from  the  Hebrew  psalms, 
concludes  that  he  meant  definitely  to  affirm  the  unity  of 
God  in  opposition  to  Homeric  polytheism,  and  that  fur- 
ther this  God  is  the  visible  world,  but  yet  perhaps  a  per- 
sonality. 

As  for  the  soul  of  man,  "the  bounds  of  soul,"  said 
Heraclitus,  "thou  couldst  not  by  going  discover  though 
thou  didst  travel  every  road;  so  deep  a  logos  hath  it" 
(fr.  45).  Logos  is  one  of  Heraclitus'  chief  contribu- 
tions to  philosophy,  a  cosmic  principle,  actively  intelli- 
gent and  thinking,  and  operative  in  man  and  in  all  nature, 
rational  and  divine.  And  here  he  led  the  way  for  Plato 
and  the  Stoics,  for  Philo  and  the  fourth  Evangelist. 

Now,  in  conclusion,  to  survey  what  we  have  seen.  The 
Greek  world  has  travelled  far  from  Homer.  Heraclitus 
and  the  philosophers  have  a  new  outlook  altogether,  see 
a  new  world,  a  world  vaster,  more  ordered,  more  think- 
able, but  a  world,  as  they  admit,  of  problems.  "Guess 
is  over  all,"  said  Xenophanes  (fr.  34).  The  Orphic  has 
his  philosophy  of  all  existence,  but  a  practical  problem 
occupies  his  energies — the  management  of  something 
with  the  gods  that  will  save  his  own  soul  and  give  him 
peace.  The  two  groups  are  looking  different  ways — not 
without  some  contempt  for  each  other;  and  from  now 


BEGINNINGS  OF  GREEK  CRITICISM      103 

onward  the  endeavour  of  some  of  the  greatest  teachers 
of  Greece  is  to  bring  them  together.  Religion  may  be 
reformed;  its  squalid  fears,  its  sensual  sacrifices,  its 
phallic  songs  and  foolish  myths  and  symbols  might  be 
swept  away — or,  if  not  quite  swept  away,  explained 
away  or  toned  down.  Plato  stands  for  thorough  reform, 
Plutarch  for  explanation  and  apology.  And  Philosophy 
might  be  brought  to  bow  the  knee  to  Religion,  to  find  a 
justification  for  cult  and  tradition,  to  humanise  itself  to 
the  extent  of  recognising  the  poor  frail  soul  of  man, 
unequal  to  high  thought  and  speculation,  full  of  fears 
and  in  desperate  need  of  God  or  of  something  it  can  per- 
suade itself  to  be  God,  on  which  it  might  lean  in  its 
uneasy  transits  through  a  world  of  daemons  and  dangers. 
But  neither  will  quite  take  the  trouble  to  understand  the 
other.  The  abstract  world-soul  will  not  do  for  the 
devotee,  and  "truth  or  something  that  might  pass  for 
it"  revolts  the  philosopher;  the  one  does  not  realise  the 
passion  for  truth  and  the  other  hardly  grasps  the  passion 
for  personality  in  God. 


V 

EARLIER  ISRAEL 

THE  contrast  between  Greece  and  Israel  is  perhaps 
nowhere  more  marked  than  in  the  story  of  their  religious 
development,  but  certain  tendencies  are  to  be  traced  alike 
in  both.  Greece  and  Israel,  each  on  its  own  way,  knew 
the  impulse  to  moralise  religion  and  to  personalise  the 
divine;  both  felt  the  drive  to  monotheism,  both  grew 
more  and  more  conscious  of  the  significance  of  the  indi- 
vidual, and  both  pursued  his  story  beyond  the  gates  of 
Hades.  The  greater,  then,  the  contrasts,  the  more  im- 
portant is  the  common  experience,  the  more  suggestion 
too  for  us,  when  we  find  the  minds  of  men  so  different 
in  race,  in  outlook  and  habits  of  thought,  responding  in 
the  same  way  to  human  experience. 

It  is  some  ways  a  great  deal  harder  to  follow  the 
course  of  the  story  of  Hebrew  religion  than  of  Greek, 
because  the  history  has  been  confused.  The  Greeks 
theorised  about  their  ancient  history,  but  they  never 
deliberately  rewrote  it.  Plato  denounced  the  influence 
of  Homer  as  a  religious  teacher,  but  he  never  got  the 
Iliad  and  the  Odyssey  expurgated  or  remodelled.  But 
in  Hebrew  literature  the  hand  of  the  reviser  is  every- 
where; nothing  escapes  him  but  by  accident;  and  the 
sound  principle  that  the  detail  must  be  explained  by  the 
general  tenor  has  been  misapplied  by  the  commentator, 
who  failed  to  remark  that  his  documents  were  not  in 
anything  approaching  their  original  form.  Luther,  four 
centuries  ago,  however,  "denied  the  Mosaic  authorship 
of  part  of  the  Pentateuch;  he  declared  Job  to  be  an  alle- 

104 


EARLIER  ISRAEL  105 

gory;  Jonah  was  so  childish  that  he  was  almost  inclined 
to  laugh  at  it ;  the  books  of  Kings  were  'a  thousand  paces 
ahead  of  Chronicles  and  more  to  be  believed.'  Ecclesi- 
astes  has  neither  boots  nor  spurs,  but  rides  in  socks,  as 
I  did  when  I  was  in  the  cloister."  *  It  was  two  centuries, 
however,  before  Astruc  made  the  suggestions  from  which 
date  the  modern  methods  of  criticism  that  have  brought 
what  order  is  possible  into  Old  Testament  History.  We 
are  now  taught  to  recognise  four  or  five  hands,  where 
once  that  of  Moses  alone  was  seen — four  or  five  at  least, 
with  corrections  and  modifications  by  more  still.  I  do 
not  need  here  to  speak  in  detail  of  the  Jehovist  and  the 
Elohist,  whether  individuals  or  schools,  the  Jehovist's 
work  completed,  as  some  think,  by  about  840  B.C.,  the 
Elohist's  by  about  775  B.C.;  nor  of  the  man  or  men  who 
fused  the  two  narratives  into  one.  Deuteronomy,  which 
existed  at  least  in  nucleus  about  620  B.C.,  marks  a  stage 
in  the  religious  development  of  Israel  ahead  of  the  other 
two.  The  Priestly  Code,  which  grew  in  and  after  the 
exile,  only  concerns  us  for  the  purposes  of  this  lecture 
in  a  negative  way;  we  have  to  beware  of  the  influence  of 
its  authors  in  every  quotation  we  make.  For,  last  of  all, 
by  men  of  letters  or  by  school,  the  great  combination 
that  we  know  as  the  Pentateuch  was  formed  of  all  these 
very  diverse  materials — and,  fortunately  for  the  modern 
scholar,  the  work  was  not  very  efficiently  done.  Com- 
pilers and  harmonisers  are  not  apt  to  do  their  work  well ; 
if  they  had  the  literary  sense  needed  for  their  task,  they 
would  have  as  a  rule  the  instinct  to  be  doing  something 
else. 

One  tendency  marks  all  the  documents  with  which  we 
have  to  deal — a  tendency  with  two  distinct  features. 
We,  all  of  us,  unconsciously  re-create  the  past  in  the 
light  of  the  present,  import  the  present  into  the  past  and 

1  Preserved  Smith,  Life  and  Letters  of  M.  Luther,  p.  268. 


106  PROGRESS  IN  RELIGION 

find  the  ideas  of  to-day  operative  there,  see  our  own  con- 
victions in  our  spiritual  ancestors  and  our  political  and 
religious  opponents  in  those  who  opposed  them.  This  is 
natural,  and  it  is  more  legitimate  than  some  historians 
allow,  for  the  past  was  at  least  once  alive,  and  its  greater 
minds  were  in  fact  more  modern  than  contemporaries 
could  imagine,  or  than  matter-of-fact  historians  under- 
stand. On  the  other  hand,  controversy  always  seeks 
weapons  from  the  armoury  of  the  past,  and  a  great  point 
is  made  when  it  is  shown,  or  even  asserted,  that  the  inno- 
vation of  which  our  opponents  complain  is  "the  oldest 
rule  in  the  book."  Hebrew  history  was  re-written  with 
a  purpose,  and  it  was  profoundly  altered.  "See,"  writes 
Wellhausen,  "what  Chronicles  has  made  out  of  David! 
The  founder  of  the  kingdom  has  become  the  founder  of 
the  temple  and  the  public  worship,  the  king  and  hero  at 
the  head  of  his  companions  in  arms  has  become  the  singer 
and  master  of  ceremonies  at  the  head  of  a  swarm  of 
priests  and  Levites;  his  clearly-cut  figure  has  become  a 
feeble  holy  picture,  seen  through  a  cloud  of  incense.  .  .  . 
He  has  had  now  to  place  his  music  at  the  service  of  the 
cultus  and  write  psalms  along  with  Asaph,  Heman  and 
Jeduthun,  the  Levitical  singing  families."  2 

Disentangling  the  history  as  best  we  can,  with  the  help 
of  modern  scholarship,  the  main  movements  become 
fairly  clear  for  us.  The  detail,  as  ever  in  stories  of 
religious  development,  is  often  very  far  from  clear. 
Words,  as  we  have  seen,  even  when  we  have  no  doubt 
of  their  authenticity,  are  ambiguous  witnesses.  Here  we 
are  always  haunted  with  the  doubt  as  to  whether  our  wit- 
nesses are  personated.  But  still,  when  we  take  a  survey 
of  centuries  together,  the  main  points  stand  out;  and  it 
is  these  that  we  want. 

The  Greeks,  as  we  saw,  in  obedience  to  a  universal 

2  Prolegomena,  p.   182. 


EARLIER  ISRAEL  107 

instinct  personalised  their  gods;  and  under  the  stress  of 
what  seems  a  necessity  of  thought  they  moved  toward 
some  sort  of  ultimate  monotheism;  but  almost  in  propor- 
tion as  their  god  grew  to  be  One,  he  lost  personality  and 
sank  into  being  a  principle.  Here  is  the  first  and  perhaps 
the  most  striking  contrast  with  Israel.  The  Hebrew 
moved  much  more  definitely,  and  it  would  seem  more 
naturally  and  at  an  earlier  stage,  to  monotheism;  and 
with  each  step — till  we  reach  the  end  of  the  prophetic 
period — the  personality  of  Jehovah  grew  more  distinct, 
more  individual,  and  more  intensely  real  and  significant 
for  every  worshipper.  The  Greek  monotheist  was  a 
philosopher  and  in  intellectual  habit  an  aristocrat;  he 
never  believed  that  the  people  could  take  in  the  concep- 
tion of  One  God  or  that  they  would  be  content  with  it 
if  they  did.  He  conceded  polytheism  to  the  vulgar  and 
with  it  idolatry — with  the  result  that  his  monotheism  re- 
mained a  paradox  or  an  irrelevancy,  a  discussion  of  the 
schools,  not  a  conviction  of  the  market-place.  When  the 
Greek  philosopher  became  Christian,  he  carried  his  habit 
with  him — and,  convinced  that  the  vulgar  would  never 
be  satisfied  with  One  God,  he  once  more  conceded  a 
practical  polytheism  in  the  worship  of  the  saints;  'and 
heathen  Artemis  yielded  her  functions  to  her  own  geni- 
tive case  transformed  into  Saint  Artemidos.8  So  the 
world  saw  the  religion  of  Jesus  infected  with  image- 
worship.  The  Hebrew  monotheist  was  a  man  of  the 
people,  even  when  he  was  a  priest  or  a  land-owner.  One 
of  the  most  striking  of  the  prophets  was  a  herdsman. 
The  Hebrew,  then,  assumed  that  his  people  could  per- 
fectly well  take  in  the  idea  of  One  God,  and  he  was 
proved  right  by  the  history  of  Israel  and  even  more 
remarkably  by  the  history  of  Islam.  So  far  from  mono- 

3  Hamilton,  Incubation,  p.  174;  J.  T.  Bent,  "Researches  among  the  Cyclades" 
(Journal  of  Hellenic  Studies,  v.  p.  46). 


108  PROGRESS  IN  RELIGION 

theism  being  unintelligible  to  the  vulgar,  it  becomes  a 
glorifying  and  ennobling  passion;  there  is  no  god  but 
God,  and  Muhammad  and  countless  millions  are  his 
prophets,  fervid  and  clear,  every  one  of  them.  And  with 
Hebrew  monotheism  there  developed  a  hatred  of  idolatry. 
When  the  Hebrew  became  Christian  his  new  religion  saw 
him  still  a  passionate  monotheist,  a  hater  of  idols;  and 
wherever  a  genuine  pulse  of  the  Old  Testament  religion 
still  beats  in  Christendom,  there  is  the  monotheist  still, 
uncompromising. 

On  the  other  hand,  the  contrast  is  only  less  surprising 
between  the  Greek  and  the  Hebrew  in  their  views  of  the 
individual  man.  One  might  well  have  expected  to  find 
Egyptian  influences  potent  in  Hebrew  religion;  but  where 
Egyptian  thought  and  usage  laid  most  emphasis  the  He- 
brew laid  none  at  all.  The  elaborate  care  which  the 
Egyptian  took  of  the  dead,  the  mummy,  the  "Book  o-f 
the  Dead,"  the  pyramid — they  all  point  back  to  a  theory, 
a  conviction  of  a  personal  immortality;  and  the  Hebrew 
is  hardly  interested  in  it  at  all.  We  are  told  that  there 
are  only  four  clear  allusions  to  immortality  in  the  Old 
Testament;  stranger  still,  none  of  them  is  in  Jeremiah, 
and  Jeremiah  was  as  individual  and  self-conscious  as 
A'rchilochus  or  Sappho,  and  the  interest  of  his  life 
centred  in  his  personal  relations  with  Jehovah.  Even- 
tually the  idea  of  immortality  developed,  as  we  see  in 
Apocalyptic  literature,  but  how  late,  when  we  think  of 
the  Homeric  hymn  to  Demeter,  of  the  mysteries  of 
Eleusis  and  of  Plato's  Phaedo ! 

I  know  of  no  explanation  for  these  contrasts.  Renan 
once  spoke  of  a  primitive  Semitic  tendency  to  mono- 
theism; but  that  is  no  explanation,  it  is  a  mere  re- 
statement of  our  problem — to  say  nothing  of  the  verdict 
of  modern  and  perhaps  less  rhetorical  scholars  that  it 


EARLIER  ISRAEL  109 

cannot  be  maintained.4  The  historian,  confronted  with 
the  Hebrew  prophets,  turns  almost  by  instinct  to  the 
earlier  history  of  Israel  to  find  at  least  the  germs  of  their 
amazing  monotheism.  He  will  ask:  What  is  the  origin 
of  this  Jehovah?  What  makes  him  so  different  from 
Chemosh,  the  god  of  Moab?  In  view  of  Greek  and 
Hindu  amalgamations  of  their  gods,  how  could  this  God 
escape  being  swamped  among  the  Baals  of  Canaan,  and 
identified  with  them?  We  know  that  there  was  at  times 
a  strong  probability  that  this  would  happen;  and  it  did 
not  happen ;  but  why  ?  An  Egyptian  king,  Amen  Hotep 
IV  (Ikhn-Aton),  established  a  very  remarkable  mono- 
theism as  the  state  religion  of  Egypt,  and  it  lasted  till 
the  end  of  his  reign  and  was  gone;  the  Egyptian  people 
would  not  have  it.5  Why  would  Israel  have  Jehovah? 
To  reply  that  Jehovah  began  as  their  own  tribal  god  is 
not  to  answer  the  question  (cf.  p.  46).  Athene  was 
perhaps  the  cantonal  goddess  of  Athens,  but  she  did  not 
keep  out  Dionysus  or  dozens  of  other  gods  either.  Why 
did  the  monotheistic  worship  of  Jehovah  capture  Israel? 
Why,  to  put  the  question  differently,  were  there 
always  monotheists  in  Israel,  enthusiasts  for  Jehovah? 
Arid  finally,  why  and  how  did  Jehovah  manage  to  remain 
so  personal,  when  Zeus  became  a  dogma,  an  abstract 
noun?  It  is  again  not  a  complete  answer  to  say  that 
there  were  many  Zeus-es,  each  so  personal,  that,  when 
they  were  all  fused,  the  resultant  Zeus  was  impossible, 
a  negation  of  all  decency.  Jehovah  was  not  fused  with 
other  gods;  he  annihilated  them;  and  slowly  the  people 
of  Judah  recognised  this.  The  wonder  is  that  it  hap- 
pened at  all. 

Of  course,  it  is  clear  that  the  agents  by  whom  all 

4  G.   A.  Barton,  Semitic  Origins,  p.  321. 

8  See  the  interesting  chapter   (with  the  King's  hymns)    in   Breasted,  History 
a>f  the  Ancient  Egyptians. 


110  PROGRESS  IN  RELIGION 

was  achieved  with  the  prophets.  Then  they  have  to  be 
explained,  and  I  find  a  Semitic  scholar  of  note  conclude 
a  long  and  learned  research  into  Semitic  origins  with  the 
admission  that  "the  moral  standards  of  the  prophets  and 
their  conceptions  of  God  are  utterly  unaccounted  for  by 
their  environment."  8  The  explanations  which  I  have 
seen  attempted  seem  to  me  to  fail  in  two  ways :  they  rest 
a  great  deal  too  much  on  conjecture;  and  their  authors 
do  not  appear  to  realise  that  it  is  a  question  of  dynamic, 
and  they  offer  nothing  with  force  or  life  enough  in  it  to 
be  the  real  source  of  what  we  have  to  explain.  This  is 
not  to  dispute  their  reconstructions,  I  am  not  qualified 
to  do  that ;  they  may  be  right  in  every  particular ;  but  the 
sum  of  their  particulars  seems  to  me  to  omit  just  what 
I  want  to  find.  I  am  not  prepared  with  a  hypothesis 
myself;  in  the  Cambridge  caste  to  which  I  belong,  to 
advance  a  great  theory  outcastes  a  man,  and  though  I 
should,  I  hope,  be  ready  for  that,  it  could  only  be  when 
I  am  a  great  deal  surer  of  my  ground.  At  present  I  do 
not  propound  a  theory;  but  even  my  caste  allows  me  to 
ask  myself  a  question. 

When  we  reach  the  prophets,  the  question  of  Moses 
at  once  rises;  it  rises,  and,  like  so  many  more,  it  waits 
an  answer.  The  modern  student  must  often  echo  the 
cry  of  the  Israelites:  "As  for  this  Moses,  we  wot  not 
what  is  become  of  him"  (Ex.  iii.  21).  Once  he  was  as 
clear  and  well-known  a  figure  as  Agamemnon;  but  since 
then,  like  Agamemnon,  he  has  had  his  very  existence 
doubted.  To-day,  however,  scholars  in  a  good  many 
fields  incline  to  accept  the  existence  of  the  great  law- 
givers of  the  peoples;  perhaps  even  Lycurgus,  stripped 
of  every  legend,  may  struggle  into  history  again.  We 
have  at  least  to  ask  what  may  be  said  of  Moses  and  his 
work  that  will  stand  the  test  of  historical  criticism. 

8  G.  A.   Barton,   Semitic  Origins,  p.   306. 


EARLIER  ISRAEL  111 

The  Hebrews  believed  that  they  owed  their  escape 
from  Egypt  and  the  foundations  of  their  religion  to 
Moses,  and  to  these  modern  scholars  add  the  beginnings 
of  the  nation.  Moses,  they  suggest,  gave  the  various 
tribes — some  of  them — the  beginnings  of  that  process 
which  saw  them  for  two  reigns  a  united  people.  So 
much  would  probably  be  conceded  in  the  case  of  a  nation 
known  to  what  used  to  be  called  secular  history.  The 
book  of  Deuteronomy,  dated  about  621  B.C.,  implies  a 
very  strong  tradition;  but  if  the  date  of  Moses  is  about 
1300  B.C.,  we  have  a  long  gap  to  fill.  Working  back,  we 
find  Elijah  about  850  B.C.,  who  does  not  indeed  mention 
Moses,  but  whose  story  implies  what  is  really  of  more 
concern  to  us,  a  sense  that  for  Israel  to  worship  another 
god  instead  of  Jehovah  is  a  national  apostasy.  As  the 
habit  of  worshipping  other  gods  along  with  Jehovah  was 
an  ingrained  temptation  with  the  Hebrew  people,  we  are 
carried  back  a  good  deal  farther.  The  narratives  of 
Jehovists  and  Elohists  which  tell  of  Moses  are  dated  300 
years  after  his  death.7  Working  downward,  we  find  in 
Judges  (xviii.  30)  the  adventures  of  a  grandson  of 
Moses — adventures  so  discreditable  to  the  descendant  of 
the  founder  of  the  religion  as  later  conceived,  that,  while 
we  can  understand  the  quiet  emendation  of  the  grand- 
father's name,  the  improbability  and  unsuitability  of  the 
grandson's  conduct  go  some  way  to  guarantee  the  grand- 
father. It  is  what  a  modern  scholar  in  another  field 
would  call  a  "pillar-text."  The  foundation  seems  a  slight 
one;  but  we  have  to  remember  that  epochs  of  thought 
and  epochs  of  national  life  are  normally  the  work  .of 
some  significant  man,  of  some  hero,  as  Carlyle  called 
him ;  and  in  this  story  we  have  both  kinds  of  epoch  asso- 
ciated with  a  name,  embedded  firmly  in  national  memory. 
Despite  the  case  of  Persia,  which  forgot  the  Achaemenids, 

7  J.  P.  Peters,  Religion  of  Hebrews,  85. 


112  PROGRESS  IN  RELIGION 

this  weighs  a  good  deal  with  scholars.  Moses  may  well 
leave  Agamemnon  in  the  limbo  where  Odysseus  found 
him  and  come  back  into  History — not  as  the  hero  of  a 
hundred  episodes,  but  as  a  national  hero  of  long  ago,  who 
gave  a  people  a  new  consciousness  of  itself  and  a  new 
sense  of  relation  to  its  god. 

The  god  was  Jehovah,  and  he  is  associated  with  the  tra- 
dition of  the  exodus  from  Egypt;  but  whose  god  Jehovah 
was  before  that,  or  what  his  relation  to  Israel,  is  dis- 
puted. The  Old  Testament,  as  it  stands  modelled  to  ulti- 
mate Jewish  orthodoxy,  refers  Jehovah's  first  dealings 
with  Israel  back  to  Abraham;  but  Abraham  raises  more 
problems  than  we  need  wait  to  solve,  and  scholars  to-day 
emphasise  some  curious  passages  in  Exodus.  The 
Elohist  and  the  Priestly  Code  narrate  that  the  God  who 
spoke  to  Moses  told  him  that  he  had  not  previously  been 
known  by  the  name  Jehovah ; 8  the  patriarchs  had  known 
him  as  El-Shaddai,  and  the  Elohist  says  (Joshua  xxiv. 
14)  that  in  Egypt  the  Israelites  were  idolaters.  It  is 
maintained,  too,  with  some  plausibility,  that  Jehovah  was 
the  god  of  the  Kenites,  into  which  tribe  Moses  married 
(Ex.  xviii.),  and  that  Heber  the  Kenite  "officiated  as 
though  introducing  Moses  into  a  new  cult";  and  the 
covenant  between  Israel  and  Jehovah  follows.  For  cen- 
turies Sinai  was  regarded  as  the  home  of  Jehovah,  far 
away  from  his  people's  land,  from  which  mountain  he 
swept  down  to  aid  them  in  battle,  as  the  ancient  poem  of 
Deborah  tells  us.  The  Kenites,  moreover,  to  the  south  of 
Judah  remained  loyal  to  old  ways  of  the  desert,  to  old 
religion,  down  to  the  day  of  Jeremiah  (xxxv.),  and  they 
had  lent  a  hand  to  Jehu  in  the  extirpation  of  Baal-worship 
in  Northern  Israel  (2  Kings  x.  15).  Though  conscious 
of  a  distinct  descent,  they  were  reckoned  as  in  Judah; 

8  G.  A.  Barton,  Semitic  Origins,  p.  276;  E  in  Ex.  iii.  13  f.;  P  in  Ex.  vi. 
af.;  J.  P.  Peters,  Religion  of  the  Hebrews,  p.  89;  Budde,  Religion  of  Israel, 
p.  13  ff. 


EARLIER  ISRAEL  113 

and  the  Jehovist  document,  which  is  supposed  to  be  of 
Judaean  origin,  shows  no  consciousness  of  Jehovah- 
worship  being  anything  but  primeval.  Jehovah  was  a 
god  of  war,  and  he  carried  the  people  covenanted  with 
him  to  victory;  and  so  began  the  great  development 
which  we  find  on  far  loftier  heights  in  the  prophets. 

Such  is  the  reconstruction  of  modern  scholarship,  not 
indeed  unchallenged,  but  strongly  supported.9  I  am  not 
competent  to  offer  an  opinion  on  its  value,  and  happily 
it  is  not  of  first  importance  to  us  to  determine  if  Moses 
or  Abraham  first  realised  Jehovah.  Here  as  with  the 
Greeks,  and  as  Aristotle  pointed  out,  the  end  is  the  ex- 
planation of  the  beginning  and  of  more  consequence. 
Nor  need  we  spend  time  on  the  Decalogue  of  Moses;  that 
he  was  a  law-giver  is  the  tradition  of  Israel,  and  there 
is  no  improbability  in  this.  Whether  he  had  reached  the 
stage  to  give  his  people  the  familiar  Decalogue,  has  been 
much  debated.  It  is  pointed  out  that  it  comes  in  the 
Elohist's  section  (Ex.  xx.),  while  an  alternative  deca- 
logue is  given  by  the  Jehovist  (Ex.  xxxiv.),  a  series  of 
commandments  dealing  much  more  with  ritual  and  much 
less  with  ethics,  and  therefore  more  likely  to  be  primi- 
tive. The  second  commandment,  "Thou  shalt  make  thee 
no  molten  gods,"  seems  a  protest  against  luxurious  and 
costly  images  rather  than  a  prohibition  of  all  images 
whatever.  In  any  case  Hebrew  religion  took  a  long  time 
in  reaching  the  observance  of  this  law. 

Little  need  be  said  here  of  the  origins  of  the  Hebrew 
people.  They  hardly  concern  us,  except  as  showing  the 
strange  and  confused  elements  from  which  a  nation  may 
arise;  and  it  may  be  noted  that  such  fragments  of  fact 
as  we  get  do  not  throw  much  light  on  the  early  history 
of  Jehovah.  Among  the  Tel-el- Amarna  tablets  10  (which 

9  See  G.   A.  Barton,  Semitic  Origins,  p.  275. 

10  Cf.    G.    A.    Barton,    op.   cit.,   p.    273  £.;    Budde,    op.    cit.f    p.    5;    Skinner, 
Genesis,  p.  xvi. 


114  PROGRESS  IN  RELIGION 

are  written  in  Babylonian  script,  and  are  dated  about 
1400  B.C.)  are  some  letters  of  Abdikheba  of  Jerusalem, 
which  tell  of  people  called  Khabiri  invading  Canaan. 
There  are  references  to  Egyptian  over-lordship  over  a 
crowded  land  full  of  walled  towns  of  Babylonian  culture 
and  full  of  war — not  such  a  land  of  pastoral  spaces  as 
we  had  pictured  from  the  story  of  Abraham  and  Isaac. 
We  learn  also  of  places  called  Jakob-el  and  Joseph-el. 
A  stele  of  the  Egyptian  king  Meren-Ptah  (discovered 
by  Flinders  Petrie  in  1896)  places  Israel  among  enemies 
whom  the  king  destroyed  in  Palestine — roughly  about 
the  date  of  the  exodus.  These  fragments  of  fact  are 
a  little  difficult  to  adjust  to  the  Pentateuch  as  it  stands. 
Possibly  the  Khabiri  were  not  the  Hebrews,  but  a  tribe 
of  the  same  type.  In  Greek  history  we  have  odd  and 
perplexing  hints  of  tribes  and  peoples,  whose  numbers 
and  movements  we  do  not  know,  engaged  in  war  and 
migration  about  the  Aegean  lands,  and  at  last  Homer 
comes  out  of  the  confusion.  So  it  is  with  these  Hebrews; 
their  origins  we  do  not  know  (what  people's  origins  do 
we  know?),  and  then  we  find  them  in  Palestine,  more 
or  less  masters  of  the  country — tribes  of  perhaps  various 
stocks,  but  not  incapable  of  settling  down  into  a  common 
race,  as  Angles,  Jutes,  Saxons,  Celts  and  Danes  made 
English.  Some  at  least  of  the  tribes  had  been  in  Egypt, 
and  had  come  triumphantly  away.  Gad  was  at  once  the 
name  of  one  of  the  tribes  and  of  the  Aramaean  and 
Phoenician  god  of  Luck;  A'sher  may  be  a  divine  name 
or  a  place-name.  As  sometimes  happens  in  such  matters, 
the  twelve  tribes  are  a  little  difficult  to  adjust,  as  the 
number  is  obviously  an  arbitrary  one,  and  at  least  thir- 
teen tribes  formed  Israel.  Our  oldest  documents  upon 
the  tribes  are  the  Song  of  Deborah,  which  is  contempo- 
rary with  the  events  it  describes,  and  the  Blessing  of 
Jacob,  which  is  old  and  obscure  but  belongs  to  a  period 


EARLIER  ISRAEL  115 

centuries  later  than  the  date  of  Jacob,  if  he  had  a  date 
at  all. 

So  far  we  have  been  moving  in  a  world  only  dimly 
revealed  to  us  in  fragments  and  guesses ;  but  when  Israel, 
in  some  general  sense  of  the  name,  enters  Canaan,  we 
find  some  agreement  among  our  guides,  Jehovist,  Elohist, 
the  author  of  the  Priestly  Code,  and  the  modern  scholars. 
Not  about  everything — not  about  Joshua,  nor  even 
David,  but  about  that  struggle  between  the  worship  of 
Jehovah  and  the  cults  of  Palestine  which  ended  in  the 
victory  of  prophetic  religion.  It  is  agreed  that  now  the 
issue  was  whether  Jehovah  was  to  be  merged  among  the 
gods  of  the  land.  Whether  he  was  known  to  Abraham 
first  or  to  Moses  does  not  greatly  matter;  nor  if  neither 
of  them  knew  him  at  all.  The  period  before  us  shows 
a  people  who  do  know  Jehovah,  but  are  uncertain  so 
far  as  to  his  position  and  his  character. 

Scholars  have  little  difficulty  in  giving  us  the  general 
outlines  of  Semitic  religion,  and  much  that  they  tell  us 
is  found  far  beyond  the  range  of  Semites.  The  great 
literature  of  Babylon,  the  archaeological  remains  of 
Canaan,  reveal  peoples  akin  to  this  Israel  which  now 
concerns  us.  There  are  great  differences  among  them  in 
culture,  and  some  in  outlook,  as  a  result  of  their  different 
experiences  in  settlement  and  wandering.  Life  in  the 
desert  differentiates  a  tribe  from  its  agricultural  or  town- 
dwelling  kindred;  and  their  religions  will  show  the  re- 
action of  the  circumstances.  Israel's  religion,  by  its 
separation  and  desert-life,  had,  we  gather,  escaped  some 
features  which  had  developed  in  Canaan.  But  now  Israel 
was  to  live  in  Canaan,  and  the  conquest  was  such  a  con- 
quest as,  we  are  gradually  learning,  generally  accom- 
panies a  settlement  in  a  new  land.  The  Achaean  did 
not  exterminate  the  "Mediterranean  race,"  nor  the 
Saxon  the  Celt,  nor  the  Norman  the  Saxon,  nor  the 


116  PROGRESS  IN  RELIGION 

Spaniard  the  Inca.  In  every  case  it  was  amalgamation, 
slower  or  quicker;  and  in  Canaan,  we  learn,  it  was  amal- 
gamation. The  Deuteronomist,  six  hundred  years  later, 
represents  Moses  as  inculcating  extermination  just  as  he 
represents  him  emphasising  worship  in  that  place  alone 
which  the  Lord  shall  choose;11  but  in  both  cases  he  is 
re-moulding  history  nearer  to  his  heart's  desire.  Inter- 
marriages, it  is  evident,  if  only  from  the  story  of  Ruth, 
were  frequent,  and  that  is  a  constant  source  of  religious 
change.  Intermarriage  went  on  down  to  the  days  of 
Nehemiah.  And  when  the  stock  of  religious  ideas  on 
both  sides  comprised  so  many  held  in  common,  the  won- 
der grows  that  the  religion  of  Jehovah  was  not  swamped 
altogether. 

Semitic  religion  covered  a  wide  range  of  beliefs  and 
superstitions  and  practices.12  The  Semites,  like  other 
primitive  peoples  worshipped  the  dead  (cf.  Deut.  xxvi. 
14),  sacred  stones,  sacred  trees,  sacred  wells,  sacred  ani- 
mals, and  spirits  of  all  sorts — of  birth  and  disease,  of 
the  house  and  the  desert.  They  honoured  the  objects 
of  their  devotion  with  sprinkled  blood,  by  circumcision, 
by  offerings  of  milk  and  hair,  by  kissing,18  by  feasts, 
and  sometimes  by  human  sacrifices.  A  story,  thrown 
back  into  patriarchal  times,  tells  how  in  the  persons  of 
Abraham  and  Isaac  God  forbade  human  sacrifice. 
Scholars  generally  agree  that  this  rite  is  not  strictly 
primitive,  and  is  more  prevalent  among  the  semi-civilised 
than  among  savages.  It  rests  on  several  beliefs — e.g. 
that  the  gods  want  attendants,  or  are  appeased  by  the 
death  of  a  wrongdoer,  or  that  they  like  human  flesh ;  and 
the  rite  becomes  a  form  of  insurance,  in  war,  in  famine, 
in  time  of  plague,  and  it  recurs  in  history  when  trouble 
gets  past  a  certain  point.  Children  were  buried  under 

11  Deut.  xii.   5. 

12  See  Addis,  Hebrew  Religion;  Marti,  Religion  of  O.  T.,  p.  80  ff. 

13  i   Kings  xix.   18. 


EARLIER  ISRAEL  117 

foundation  stones,  as  the  archaeologists  have  shown. 
Canaan  was  no  new-found  land;  it  had  been  long  in- 
habited, and  it  was  like  such  lands,  full  of  holy  places. 
"Bethel  and  Beersheba,  Dan  and  Gilgal,  were  the  prin- 
cipal, but  Mizpeh,  the  top  of  Tabor,  and  Carmel,  perhaps 
Penuel,  were  also  conspicuous  among  the  countless  high 
places  of  the  land." 14  Gilgals  were  many — ancient 
stone-circles,  and  Mizpehs,  which  were  watch-towers, 
seers'  stations.  Beth-el  was  a  house  of  God,  Beersheba 
had  a  sacred  well,  where  Abraham  planted  a  "grove" 
(or  tamarisk:  Gen.  xxi.  33)  ;  and  all  over  the  land  were 
standing  stones,  at  Shechem,  Gilead,  Gibeah,  En-rogel 
and  elsewhere — Massebas — at  once  altar  and  idol  in 
one,15  perhaps  at  last  a  god's  abode.  And  groves  and 
sacred  trees  meet  us  at  every  turn,  till  the  prophet  indig- 
nantly declares  that  there  is  idolatry  "under  every  green 
tree" — much  as  we  see  it  in  India  still.  When  a  place 
is  once  holy,  it  is  apt  to  remain  holy.  There  are  Moslem 
holy-places  in  Asia  Minor  which  have  been  Christian 
and  were  heathen  before  that.  Invaders,  like  the 
Israelites,  take  over  such  places — cromlechs,  holy  wells, 
pillars,  trees  and  graves,  from  the  people  they  conquer, 
and  take  with  them  the  cult  and  ritual  of  each  place. 
Sometimes  the  suggestions  of  the  place  are  changed  to 
suit  the  ideas  and  preconceptions  of  the  newcomers. 
Sometimes  it  is  the  other  way.  The  Elohist  writes  of 
Bethel  and  other  places,  sacred  to  the  mind  of  Northern 
Israel,  and  gives  them  new  legends;  his  story  of  Bethel 
is  a  beautiful  one,  but  Bethel  must  long  have  been  a  holy 
place  (Luz,  Judges  i.  23).  But  long  before  the  legends 
were  re-made,  Israel  took  over  shrine  and  cult,  and  the 
thoughts  of  the  god  that  went  with  the  cult.  "Even  the 
technical  terms  connected  with  sacrifice  were  in  great 

l*  G.  A.   Smith,  Twelve  Prophets,  i.  p.  37  f. 
16  W.  Robertson  Smith,  E.  R.  S..  p.  205  & 


118  PROGRESS  IN  RELIGION 

part  identical.  The  vow,  the  whole  burnt-offering,  the 
thank-offering,  the  meat-offering,  and  a  variety  of  other 
details  appear  on  the  tablet  of  Marseilles  and  similar 
Phoenician  documents  under  their  familiar  Old  Testa- 
ment names,  showing  that  the  Hebrew  ritual  was  not  a 
thing  by  itself,  but  had  a  common  foundation  with  that 
observed  by  their  neighbours."  " 

Every  holy  place  had  its  Baal,  or  lord,  the  god  who 
gave  the  land  its  fertility,  to  whom  therefore  was  due 
the  tribute  of  first-fruits  and  worship  along  the  lines  of 
the  fertility  he  gave.17  This,  too,  Israel  took  over,  and 
learnt  under  the  name  of  holiness  an  uncleanness  he  had 
not  known  in  the  desert.  Temple  harlots  are  a  feature 
of  Semite  religion,  as  of  Hinduism,  and  a  prohibition 
in  Deuteronomy  (xxiii.  17)  is  a  sure  sign  that  Israel 
knew  them — temple  harlots  and  worse,  and  all  in  the 
worship  of  God.  Qedesha — dedicated  or  "holy  woman" 
— is  a  tell-tale  word.  It  was  one  of  the  iniquities  asso- 
ciated with  religion  against  which  Amos  and  Hosea  in- 
augurated the  protest.18  Jerusalem  was  a  new  shrine, 
but  the  power  of  the  influence  of  Canaanite  and  Phoeni- 
cian religion  is  seen  in  the  things  that  Josiah  did  away 
with  in  his  reformation — vessels  dedicated  to  Baal, 
priests  who  burned  incense  to  Baal,  to  sun  and  moon 
and  planets,  and  all  the  host  of  heaven,  the  "grove"  or 
sacred  trees,  the  sodomites,  the  horses  of  the  sun,  and  all 
sorts  of  altars  and  images,  and  "he  defiled  Topheth  which 
is  in  the  valley  of  the  children  of  Hinnom,  that  no  man 
might  make  his  son  or  his  daughter  pass  through  the 
fire  to  Molech"  (2  Kings  xxiii.  4-14).  The  later  asso- 
ciations of  the  names  Tophet  and  Gehenna  have  thus 
some  historical  justification.  The  history  as  we  have  it 
tells  us  that  other  kings  before  Josiah  made  similar  clear- 

18  Robertson  Smith,  Prophets,  p.  56. 

IT  Robertson  Smith,  E.  K.  S.,  p  94  ff. 

18  G.  A.  Smith,  Twelve  Prophets,  i.  p.  259;  Amos  ii.  7;  Hosea  iv.  13. 


EARLIER  ISRAEL  119 

ances,  and  the  evils  came  back,  as  they  seem  to  have  done 
after  Josiah's  reformation  too,19  in  honour  of  the  Queen 
of  Heaven. 

It  may  well  be  asked  how  in  such  an  atmosphere  the 
religion  of  Jehovah  was  to  survive;  or  if  the  truer  ques- 
tion be,  how  was  it  to  emerge,  it  is  no  easier  to  answer. 
The  problem,  age  after  age,  is  to  find  a  religion  that  will 
avail  for  a  world  in  flux — a  religion  which  will  safe- 
guard mankind  against  its  own  old  impulses,  freer,  it 
would  seem,  age  by  age  by  the  wearing  down  of  old 
sanctions,  and  stronger  as  every  generation  grows  more 
conscious  of  power  and  of  individuality.  A  fixed  re- 
ligion for  a  world  of  change  is  not  the  wisest  thing;  for 
a  religion  must  keep  pace  with  the  demands  upon  it,  and 
these  grow  greater  as  man  realises  himself.  Here,  then, 
was  a  people  stepping  from  the  desert  into  a  compara- 
tively old  civilisation  with  a  religion  which  we  may  call 
older  still.  The  temple  harlot  was  perhaps  the  last 
squalid  memorial  of  a  social  morality  long  outgrown. 
Canaanite  and  Babylonian  had  reached  the  conception  of 
the  sanctity  of  marriage,  if  their  gods  and  goddesses  had 
not;  for  them  religion  was  no  longer  a  force  purifying 
life,  it  was  corrupting  it,  and  giving  the  sanction  of 
God's  name  to  vices  that  revolted  decent  thinking  men 
and  women  and  that  tended  to  make  human  society  im- 
possible. The  effect  of  it  upon  newcomers  must  have 
been  twofold — to  fascinate  and  to  repel;  but  it  was  the 
way  of  the  gods  of  the  land. 

Israel  by  entering  Canaan  transformed  themselves  to 
an  agricultural  people;  and  their  religious  festivals 
changed  their  character  to  meet  the  new  situation.  It 
is  not  sound  to  say  that  the  desert  promoted  mono- 
theism, but  the  cultivated  land  at  least  made  the  com- 
plexity of  life  greater  and  introduced  men  to  new  fields 

1»  H.  P.  Smith,  O.  T.  History,  p.  336. 


120  PROGRESS  IN  RELIGION 

of  wonder  and  reflection.  But  Canaan,  as  we  have  seen, 
was  no  mere  prairie-land;  it  had  known  the  neighbour- 
hood of  two  great  lands  of  culture — Babylonian  and 
Egyptian  had  already  fought  over  its  length,  and  had 
sought  to  possess  or  to  control  it;  for,  apart  from  any- 
thing it  had  of  its  own,  it  was  the  pathway  to  regions 
of  more  importance.  When  the  armies  ceased  to  waste 
it,  the  traders  would  follow — ministers  of  change  no  less 
potent.  Philistines,  too,  had  come  from  Caphtor,  as  the 
Old  Testament  tells — not  the  barbarians  suggested  by 
the  German  slang  which  Matthew  Arnold  naturalised, 
but,  as  we  should  expect  of  people  coming  from  pre- 
historic Crete,  and  as  archaeologists  now  assure  us,  a  race 
with  a  culture  of  their  own,  and  a  religion  which  gave 
them  an  epithet  of  distinction  from  the  Semites.  If 
David's  ancestress  was  a  Moabite  woman,  his  early  asso- 
ciates and  his  guards  to  the  end  were  Philistine.  Solo- 
mon married  an  Egyptian  princess,  and  other  foreigners 
after  her.  Eighty  years  after  Solomon's  death,  Ahab 
married  a  princess  of  Tyre  and  fought  against  the  As- 
syrian at  the  battle  of  Karkar  (854  B.C.).  New  modes  of 
domestic  life,  the  field  instead  of  the  desert,  intercourse 
with  the  city-folk  of  Canaan  and  Philistia,  Weltpolitik 
involving  them  with  Egypt,  with  Tyre,  with  Syria  and 
Assyria — all  these  things  make  for  comparison,  for  criti- 
cism, and  for  change.  If  Israel  brought  a  pure  or  even 
a  potential  monotheism  into  Canaan  from  the  desert,  it 
was  bound  to  be  tested  fiercely  in  the  surroundings,  and 
in  spite  of  the  Kenites  it  is  almost  certain  that  any  tend- 
encies that  Israel  had  toward  monotheism  were  as  yet 
faint  and  undeveloped. 

Jehovah,  we  are  told,  would  hardly  have  demanded 
exclusive  worship.  He  was  the  god  of  the  federation, 
and  there  would  be  gods  of  the  home.  If  there  was  a 
Decalogue  at  all  in  those  days,  whether  the  command- 


EARLIER  ISRAEL  121 

ment  forbade  molten  images  only  or  all  images  molten 
and  graven  and  every  other  kind,  the  accepted  story 
makes  it  clear  that  there  were  images  none  the  less,  and 
plenty  of  them,  public  and  private.  If  Moses'  degenerate 
grandson — though  there  is  no  suggestion  in  the  tale  that 
he  was  so  reckoned — was  an  apostate  from  his  grand- 
father's religion  when  he  ministered  to  the  teraphim,  or 
graven  image,  stolen  from  Micah  and  set  up  in  Dan 
(Judges  xviii.  30,  31),  David  at  least  is  a  hero  of  Jewish 
story,  and  in  his  house  was  another  teraphim,  of  consid- 
erable size,  and  mistakable,  in  a  bed,  for  the  hero  him- 
self (i  Sam.  xix.  13).  In  the  eighth  century  the  Elohist 
tells  how  Rachel,  the  ancestress,  stole  her  father's 
teraphim  and  sat  on  them  to  prevent  his  recovering 
them;  and  she  incurs  no  censure  (Gen.  xxxi.  19),  even 
if  they  are  to  be  counted  as  among  the  "strange  gods" 
put  away  a  little  later  (Gen.  xxxv.  24).  These  all  look 
like  private  gods,  gods  of  a  family. 

It  is  more  startling  when  we  realise  that,  in  spite  of 
the  familiar  denunciations  of  Jeroboam,  the  son  of 
Nebat,  who  "made  Israel  to  sin"  by  setting  up  golden 
"calves"  at  Bethel  and  at  Dan  and  making  "priests  of 
the  lowest  of  the  people  which  were  not  of  the  tribe  of 
Levi,"  *°  it  was  in  reality  long  before  any  feeling  mani- 
fested itself  that  it  was  unsuitable  to  worship  Jehovah  in 
the  form  of  a  bull.  "The  state  worship  of  the  golden 
calves  led  to  no  quarrel  between  Elisha  and  the  dynasty 
of  Jehu;  and  this  one  fact  is  sufficient  to  show  that,  even 
in  a  time  of  notable  revival,  the  living  power  of  the  re- 
ligion was  not  felt  to  lie  in  the  principle  that  Jehovah 
cannot  be  represented  by  images."  21  The  Elohist  takes 
pains  to  associate  Bethel,  the  seat  of  this  "calf"  worship, 
with  Jacob  the  founder  of  the  race  and  with  his  God. 

20  i  Kings  xii.  31. 

21  Robertson  Smith,  Prophets,   p.  63;  cf.  J.   P.  Peters,  Religion  of  the  He- 
brews, p.  100. 


122  PROGRESS  IN  RELIGION 

What  is  more  surprising  is  that  Amos  himself,  though  he 
denounced  the  cult  at  Bethel,  did  not  accuse  Israel  on 
the  score  of  idolatry  or  polytheism,  or  suggest  that  in 
this  way  they  had  really  apostatised  from  the  true  God's 
revelation  of  himself.22  Hosea,  some  years  later,  appears 
to  be  the  first  prophet  to  denounce  idolatry.23  Jeroboam 
himself,  according  to  the  story,  called  his  son  Abijah — 
"Jehovah-is-his-father" — a  name  which  does  not  suggest 
conscious  apostasy;  so  that  it  is  possible  to  accept  the 
suggestion  that  he  was  moved  by  zeal  for  the  God  of 
Israel  when  he  dedicated  to  him  images  in  accord  with 
the  accepted  symbolism  of  the  times.2* 

We  need  not  give  too  facile  a  belief  to  the  orthodox 
Jewish  account  of  Jeroboam's  priests.  It  bears  the  mark 
of  controversy,  and  there  is  little  to  show  that  they  were 
much  worse  or  any  better  than  other  priests  of  a  people 
at  that  stage  of  culture.  The  evolution  of  the  priest  is 
an  interesting  theme.  The  patriarchs  generally  did  with- 
out priests,  unless  Melchizedek's  kingship  is  secondary 
to  his  priesthood.  Saul,  David  and  Solomon  built  altars 
and  sacrificed  for  themselves;  and  Samuel,  priest  or 
prophet,  was  an  Ephraimite,  not  a  Levite.  The  Hebrew 
priests,  we  are  told,  were  primarily  seers;  they  inter- 
preted oracles  and  consulted  Jehovah  on  behalf  of  his 
people,  and  revealed  his  will  in  Toroth — and  his  will 
bore  directly  upon  every  form  of  calamity.  Urim  and 
Thummim  are  not  very  lucid  words  to  us  to-day,  but 
a  hint  of  their  use  lies  behind  the  text  of  i  Sam.  xiv.  42, 
implied  by  the  Septuagint.  "O  Jehovah,  God  of  Israel," 
prays  Saul,  "wherefore  hast  thou  not  answered  thy 
servant  this  day?  If  the  iniquity  be  in  me  or  in  Jonathan 
my  son,  O  Jehovah  God  of  Israel,  give  Urim;  and  if  it 

22  H.  P.  Smith,  O.  T.  History,  p.  215. 
.    23  I  find  it  hard  to  trace  an  allusion  to  the  Decalogue  in  his  words,  Hosea 

XV.    I,    2. 

24  H.  P.  Smith,  O.  T.  History,  p.  181. 


EARLIER  ISRAEL  123 

be  in  thy  people  Israel,  give,  I  pray  thee,  Thummim." 
But  the  day  came  when  Jehovah  answered  Saul  "neither 
by  dreams,  nor  by  Urim  nor  by  prophets"  ( I  Sam.  xxviii. 
6) ;  and  Urim  and  Thummim  become  the  right  of  priest 
and  Levite — "and  of  Levi  he  said,  Let  thy  Thummim  and 
thy  Urim  be  with  thy  holy  one"  (Deut.  xxxiii.  8). 
There  were  of  course  other  ways  of  learning  the  gods' 
will — the  flight  of  birds  or  the  whisper  of  the  trees. 
The  priests  were,  naturally,  in  charge  of  the  shrines — 
Canaanite  shrines,  as  we  have  seen — and  of  the  ark  while 
it  existed,  and  at  an  early  date  we  can  see  the  beginnings 
of  their  insistence  on  privilege;  they  claimed  a  part  of 
the  sacrifice  (i  Sam.  ii.  13-16),  and  eventually  a 
monopoly  of  the  right  to  sacrifice,  till  at  last,  as  sacrifice 
came  to  fill  a  larger  place  in  religion,  the  priest  became 
central  in  religion.  Ceremony  and  ritual  were  in  his 
hands,  and  he  "taught  for  hire"  (Micah  iii.  n).  When 
we  reflect  upon  all  this,  and  remember  his  associates  at 
many  of  the  shrines,  the  Qedesha  and  her  like,  we  shall 
not  expect  to  find  in  the  priesthood  the  impulse  that 
transformed  Jehovism  into  the  purest  and  most  fervent 
of  monotheisms.  Broadly  speaking,  we  find  all  over  the 
world  that  the  priest's  business  is  rather  the  maintenance 
of  established  beliefs  and  the  performance  of  accepted 
rituals  than  the  development  of  fresh  aspects  of  religious 
truth.  That  is  left  for  the  prophets,  but  not  for  all  of 
them. 

For  even  in  those  earlier  times  Israel  had  prophets — 
Nebi'im — and  in  some  considerable  numbers.  A  story 
of  the  reign  of  Ahab  numbers  the  prophets  of  one  god 
and  another  by  hundreds  (i  Kings  xviii.).  The  Deu- 
teronomic  prohibition  of  "any  one  that  useth  divination, 
or  an  observer  of  times,  or  an  enchanter,  or  a  witch,  or 
a  charmer,  or  a  consulter  with  familiar  spirits,  or  a 
wizard,  or  a  necromancer"  (Deut.  xviii.  10,  u),  coupled 


124  PROGRESS  IN  RELIGION 

not  insignificantly  with  "any  one  that  maketh  his  son  or 
his  daughter  to  pass  through  the  fire,"  tells  a  tale  in  its 
negative.  There  were  such  people — men  who,  as  Rob- 
ertson Smith  puts  it,  had  on  the  physical  side  of  their 
being  relations  with  the  godhead — "in  the  mysterious 
instincts  of  their  lower  nature,  in  paroxysms  of  arti- 
ficially produced  frenzy,  dreams  and  diseased  visions." 
The  words  of  Balaam  picture  the  type :  "Balaam  the  son 
of  Beor  hath  said,  and  the  man  whose  eyes  are  open  hath 
said :  he  hath  said,  which  heard  the  words  of  God,  which 
saw  the  vision  of  the  Almighty,  falling  down  but  having 
his  eyes  open"  (Num.  xxiv.  3,  4);  and  the  narrative  tells 
us  that  he  spoke  after  "the  spirit  of  God  came  to  him." 
By  ventriloquism  the  wizards  made  those  who  consulted 
them  hear,  or  think  they  heard,  the  voice  of  ghosts  rising 
from  the  world  of  the  dead  ( I  Sam.  xxviii. ;  Isa.  xxix. 
4)  ;  and  they  were  paid  for  their  trouble.  Saul  consults 
Samuel  as  to  lost  asses,  and  has  a  quarter  shekel  ready 
for  him  (i  Sam.  ix.  8).  There  is  nothing  peculiar  to 
the  Semites  in  all  this;  it  is  found  all  over  the  world,  a 
potent  agency  for  fraud  and  cruelty. 

When  all  their  neighbours  knew  Nebi'im,  it  is  not  to 
be  supposed  that  Israel  could  be  ignorant,  even  before 
the  entry  into  Palestine.  Of  that  period  our  records  are 
slight  and  uncertain,  but  when  History  begins  to  speak 
with  clearer  utterance,  we  find  the  first  king  of  Israel 
powerfully  affected  by  the  Nebi'im  associated  with  Je- 
hovah. More  than  once  we  read  how  the  sight  of  them 
prophesying  worked  upon  him:  "the  spirit  of  God  was 
upon  him  also,  and  he  went  on  and  prophesied,  until  he 
came  to  Naioth  in  Ramah.  And  he  stripped  off  his 
clothes  also,  and  prophesied  before  Samuel  in  like  man- 
ner, and  lay  down  naked  all  that  day  and  all  that  night," 
king  of  Israel  as  he  was  (i  Sam.  xix.  23).  It  is  plain 

26  O.    T.  J.   C.,    p.    285. 


EARLIER  ISRAEL  125 

from  the  narrative  of  Saul's  life  that  he  was  mentally 
unstable;  and  insanity  is  still  associated  by  the  Arabs 
with  a  peculiar  relation  to  God.  One  of  the  most  bril- 
liant of  English  explorers  in  Arabia,  it  is  said,  owed  a 
good  deal  to  the  Arabs  supposing  him  to  be  mad.  Music 
in  Saul's  case,  and  in  Elisha's,  is  mentioned  as  having 
a  powerful  influence  on  the  man's  state.  The  prophet 
who  anointed  Jehu  made  the  impression  on  Jehu's 
friends  of  a  "mad  fellow"  (2  Kings  ix.  n),  though  they 
quickly  accepted  his  suggestion.  Professor  D.  B.  Mac- 
donald's  friendly  account  of  modern  dervishes  in  Egypt 
gives  a  picture  closely  parallel,26  and  makes  it  clear  that 
sincerity  is  or  may  be  an  element  in  this  form  of  ap- 
proach to  the  unseen.  Muhammad,  he  points  out,  was 
himself  a  pathological  case,  and  his  revelations  came  to 
him  in  trance;  like  all  trance-mediums  he  had  strangely 
perverted,  ideas,  but  an  impostor  he  certainly  was  not — 
not  at  least  till  the  last  ten  years  of  his  life.27  He  com- 
pares the  actions  of  the  dervishes,  whom  he  saw,  with 
the  tumultuous  shrieking,  leaping  and  crying  aloud  upon 
their  god  by  the  priests  of  Baal  and  the  cutting  them- 
selves with  knives;  and  adds,  "it  was  all  perfectly 
genuine."  28  More  strangely,  a  convert  to  Christianity 
told  him  that  there  had  been  a  certain  element  of  spiritual 
advantage  in  it  all — "then  I  was  a  saint;  but  now  I  am 
a  Christian,"  he  concluded — "with  a  plainly  regretful 
if  also  humorous  tone  in  his  voice."  29 

We  may  form  our  own  opinions  of  the  spiritual  value 
of  such  practices — the  East  is  against  the  West  on  this 
question,  but  the  East's  interest  in  it  has  been  less  scien- 
tific, because  the  East  has  accepted  possession  and  trance 
as  direct  evidence  of  contact  with  God  and  has  not  com- 
ae Aspects  of  Islam,  Lectures  V.  and  VI. 

27  Ibid.,  pp.  72,  74. 

28  Ibid.,  p.  95. 

28  Ibid.,  pp.  170-172. 


126  PROGRESS  IN  RELIGION 

pared  or  cross-examined  its  witnesses.  If  I  am  right  in 
accepting  the  view  (to  which  I  think  the  bulk  of  the  evi- 
dence— all  the  evidence — leads  a  candid  mind)  that  in 
every  case  of  trance  or  mystical  state  a  man  becomes 
conscious  of  what  he  has  met  before,  and  in  no  case 
gains  fresh  facts  or  fresh  knowledge — however  much  he 
maintains  that  to  see  the  old  in  a  new  way  is  to  make 
a  new  discovery — then  we  may  conclude  that  the  Nebi'im 
of  Jehovah  depended  upon  suggestions  that  had  reached 
them  in  their  normal  state,  and  we  may  draw  something 
from  our  conclusion.  The  heightening  which  trance  gave 
to  their  conception  of  Jehovah,  trance  gave  also  to  the 
conceptions  that  others  have  had  of  Baal,  of  Kali,  of  the 
Virgin  Mary — the  same  heightening,  the  same  convic- 
tion, with  this  result  that  we  must  look  elsewhere  for 
the  real  values. 

The  Nebi'im  of  Jehovah  were  saved  from  morbidness, 
we  are  told,  by  their  enthusiasm  for  Israel ; 30  but  prob- 
ably, if  we  knew  more,  we  might  find  the  same  national- 
ism among  the  Nebi'im  of  Chemosh,  only  with  Moab 
for  its  centre.  National  feeling  is  not  always  a  sure 
guarantee  of  sanity  or  of  truth.  Nebi'im  play  a  large 
part  in  public  affairs  in  Hebrew  history,  advising  and 
deposing  kings,  urging  to  revolt,  to  murder  and  to  war. 
The  real  progress  of  religious  thought,  however,  will 
come  from  the  stable  rather  than  the  unstable;  or  if  a 
man  is  both  by  turns,  as  sometimes  happens,  it  will  come 
from  Paul  when  he  is  not  speaking  with  tongues. 

Something  the  Nebi'im  must  have  done,  as  the 
Orphics,  so  like  them  in  Greece,  did.  They  detached 
religion  in  some  degree  from  its  established  sanctuaries 
and  from  its  officials;  they  bore  a  confused  and  doubtful 
witness  to  Jehovah — doubtful,  for  Baal  had  witness  as 
good,  and  they  kept  alive  the  tradition  of  a  national  wor- 

so  G.  A.  Smith,  The  Twelve,  i.  p.  25. 


EARLIER  ISRAEL  127 

ship,  of  a  national  god,  of  which  saner  heads  were  to 
make  a  great  deal  more. 

Man  was  wrestling  already  with  the  problems  that 
always  face  him.  Baal  was  clearly  obsolete  in  his  morals; 
a  normal  man  would  not  wish  his  own  wife  or  daughters 
to  be  attached  to  Baal's  shrine,  whatever  a  desperate 
man  might  do;  and  what  people  in  desperation  about 
children  will  vow  in  India,  we  know.  Let  us  stick  to 
the  normal  man.  He  thinks  out  moral  problems  quietly, 
and  one  day  he  will  be  ready  for  a  great  lead,  he  will 
follow  a  new  prophet  who,  on  the  basis  of  moral  sense, 
proclaims  a  revolution  in  religious  thought.  Religion 
in  old  Israel  had  its  usual  varieties — it  was  local,  na- 
tional, liturgical,  ceremonial;  it  was  merry-making  before 
the  Lord ;  and  here  and  there  it  was  personal.  The  spirit 
of  Jehovah  came  upon  a  man — sometimes  through  the 
influence  of  a  prophet  band — sometimes  in  solitude ;  and 
where  the  man  was  strongly  founded  on  ethical  thought 
and  observation,  both  morality  and  Jehovah-worship 
gained  by  it.  Jehovah  so  far  had  little  to  say  or  to 
suggest  about  a  world  beyond  the  gates  of  Death;  it 
was  very  long  before  Jehovism  looked  so  far.  Jehovah, 
again,  was  admittedly  a  god  among  gods;  every  people 
had  its  god,  its  Chemosh  or  its  Dagon.  Israel  had  Je- 
hovah, though  he,  unlike  some  of  these  gods,  had  his 
seat,  not  in  the  land  which  he  gave  to  his  people,  but 
away  upon  Sinai.  One  thing  more  we  can  say  of  Je- 
hovah even  at  this  early  period  which  we  have  not  evi- 
dence to  let  us  say  of  the  other  gods.  His  cult  was  not 
inconsistent  with  the  moral  development  of  his  people. 
The  abominations  of  religion  which  we  have  noticed 
might  be  incorporated  in  his  worship,  but  they  belonged 
elsewhere  more  properly.  Michal's  indignation  at 
David's  ecstatic  dancing  before  the  ark 81  is  a  hint  of 

81  2  Sam.  vi.  20. 


128  PROGRESS  IN  RELIGION 

a  change  of  mind  coming  over  the  Hebrews — curiously, 
here,  on  the  women's  side,  for  in  religion  the  pioneers 
have  been  most  usually  men. 

Our  inquiry  has  not  taken  us  very  far.  The  future 
of  the  world's  religion  lay  with  Israel,  but  Israel  had 
not  so  far  realised  Jehovah.  That  was  to  come,  and  its 
coming  is  as  mysterious  as  all  the  deepest  things  in  man's 
story.  Meanwhile  Jehovah  wakes  a  real  poetry  in  his 
people  and  gives  a  promise  of  greater  days.  Then  sang 
Deborah82:— 

I,  even  I,  will  sing  unto  Jehovah. 

I  will  sing  praise  to  Jehovah,  the  God  of  Israel. 

Jehovah,  when  thou  wentest  out  of  Seir, 

When  thou  marchedst  out  of  the  field  of  Edom, 

The  earth  trembled,  the  heavens  also  dropped, 

Yea,  the  clouds  dropped  water. 

The  mountains  flowed  down  at  the  presence  of  Jehovah, 

Even   yon    Sinai   at   the   presence    of   Jehovah,   the    God   of 

Israel.  .  .  . 
O  my  soul,  march  on  with  strength. 

32  Judges  v. 


VI 

THE  HEBREW  PROPHETS 

ISRAEL  began  with  the  two  old  Semitic  convictions  about 
his  God — that  Jehovah  was  the  God  of  Israel,  to  stand 
or  fall  with  Israel  and  involved  in  maintaining  Israel — 
and  that  Jehovah's  religion  was  essentially  one  of  cere- 
monial, of  rites  and  sacrifices,  and  that  when  these  re- 
ceived due  attention,  all  was  well  in  a  normal  way.1 
There  might  be  searchings  of  heart  in  days  of  darkness, 
but  religion  was  a  clear  and  straightforward  thing,  and 
normally  a  happy  and  cheerful  affair,  its  centre  a  jollifi- 
cation with  the  God.  If  there  was,  as  we  are  sometimes 
told,  a  bias  toward  the  ethical  in  Jehovism  from  the  be- 
ginning, so  there  is,  we  observe,  in  every  religion  where 
the  religious  reflect  upon  life  and  experience.  The  real 
interest  of  the  Old  Testament  for  the  modern  student  lies 
not  in  the  evidence  it  offers  of  yet  another  people  with 
a  religion  of  a  common  type — national,  ceremonial  and 
sacramental — but  in  the  emergence  of  men  who  protest 
generation  by  generation  against  the  beliefs  of  their 
countrymen,  and  who,  though  an  insignificant  and  un- 
popular minority,  compel  their  people,  by  the  sheer 
weight  of  their  teaching  and  their  personality,  to  re- 
think every  conception  they  have  formed  of  God,  till 
Israel  reaches  a  faith  without  parallel  in  the  ancient 
world. 

The  use  of  images  in  worship  was  an  axiom  in  ancient 
religion.  This  is  shown  by  Tacitus'  epigram,  when  Pom- 
pey  entered  the  Holy  of  Holies  and  found  in  it  nothing 

1G.  A.  Smith,  The  Twelve,  i.  p.  102. 

129 


130  PROGRESS  IN  RELIGION 

whatever,  vacuam  sedem  et  inania  arcana,2  a  grotesque 
discovery  to  make  in  a  shrine  so  much  talked  of  all  over 
the  world.  It  is  shown  further  by  the  instinctive  feeling 
of  the  ancients  in  spite  of  centuries  of  philosophers,  that 
the  Christians  must  be  atheists,  since  they  had  no  temples, 
no  altars  and  no  gods.  Elijah  and  Elisha,  as  we  have 
seen,  had  no  quarrel  with  the  "golden  calves"  at  Bethel. 
Men  of  real  religious  instinct  to-day  in  India  have  as 
little  quarrel  with  their  countrymen's  regard  for  the 
sacred  bull  and  the  still  stranger  things  which  India  has 
to  show.  To  Western  minds  nothing  can  be  more  repul- 
sive than  the  worship  of  the  lingam  and  its  use  in  per- 
sonal names;  and  nothing  more  unintelligible  than  that 
pure-minded  people  can  make  it  the  centre  of  their  re- 
ligion. The  explanation  appears  to  be  that  the  thing  is 
so  familiar  that  no  one  realises  what  it  is,  no  one  thinks 
about  it.  In  spite  of  the  interpretation  put  by  the  estab- 
lished text  upon  Jeroboam's  religion,  it  would  appear 
from  the  story  about  Aaron  that  the  bull  had  been  from 
time  out  of  mind  the  standard,  or  a  standard,  embodi- 
ment of  Jehovah.  It  seems  likely  that  the  brazen  serpent 
was  another  of  the  kind  at  Jerusalem.  The  trouble  taken 
in  the  Pentateuch  to  explain  it  gives  a  new  and  perhaps 
suspicious  significance  to  the  phrase  in  Kings — "the 
brazen  serpent  that  Moses  had  made." 3  Jehu  (840 
B.C.)  was  a  champion  of  Jehovah  against  the  Baal- 
worshipping  house  of  Ahab.  Ahab  had  not,  however, 
renounced  Jehovah  but  named  his  sons  for  him,  and  Jehu 
maintained  the  bull-shrines. 

The  legends  of  Elijah  and  Elisha  are  supposed  to  have 
been  reduced  to  writing  about  800  B.C.;  the  author  of  the 
Elijah  story,  at  least,  writes  with  an  ease,  a  grace  and 

2  Tacitus,  Histories,  v.  9. 

3  "A  very  ancient  emblem  of  an  original  serpent  worship,  later  converted  into 
an  emblem  of  Jehovah."     So  J.  P.  Peters,  Relig.  of  Hebrews,  p.  238;  see  Kings 
xviii.  4,  Num.  xxL  4  ff.    Cf.  H.  P.  Smith,  O.  T.  History,  p.  239. 


THE  HEBREW  PROPHETS  131 

a  vividness  that  appeal  to  every  reader.  He  moves  in 
the  atmosphere  of  miracle.  Fire  conies  from  heaven  at 
the  prophet's  call;  the  dead  are  raised,  and  leprosy  is 
inflicted  with  a  word.  Fifty  years  later  Amos  writes 
down  his  own  prophecies — a  herdsman,  whom  Words- 
worth might  well  have  quoted  in  support  of  his  views  of 
language,  a  master  of  form,  whose  style  is  as  clear  and 
direct  as  his  thought.  He  deals  in  no  miracles;  he  sees 
and  thinks  like  a  modern,  watches  events,  reasons  from 
facts,  and  trusts  the  truth  of  his  message  to  find  its  way 
to  the  consciences  of  men.  We  are  in  a  new  age — a 
world  as  modern  as  that  of  Pericles  or  Napoleon — one 
generation  away  from  a  Middle  Age  of  miracle.  We 
have  reached  a  period  of  suffering  and  of  hard  thinking, 
when  religion  gained  a  new  profundity  and  took  on  a 
new  character,  when  it  became  in  large  measure  what 
we  still  hold  it  to  be. 

The  period  falls  into  two  parts;  the  dividing  point  is 
the  fall  of  Samaria  in  721  B.C.  Before  that  we  are  con- 
cerned with  Northern  Israel  and  the  prophets  who  spoke 
to  a  kingdom  unshaken  and  prosperous.  After  that 
Northern  Israel  passes  utterly  out  of  history  and  is  abso- 
lutely lost  to  us — unless  the  guess,  a  mere  guess,  is  right 
that  the  Beni-Israel  of  Bombay  Presidency  are  a  last  sur- 
viving handful  of  them.4  Thereafter  all  the  interest 
shifts  to  Judah,  a  smaller  kingdom,  with  a  century  and 
quarter  before  it  full  of  unspeakable  menaces  without, 
of  reformation,  reaction  and  despair  within;  and  then  it 
too  falls  in  586  B.C.  Cyrus  indeed  "restored"  the  Jews 
in  538  B.C.,  but  the  exile  and  the  restoration  come  at  a 
later  point  in  our  story. 

Jeroboam  II.  reigned  over  Israel  for  forty-one  years 
(783-742  B.C.),  "and  Jehovah  said  not  that  he  would 
blot  out  the  name  of  Israel  from  under  heaven;  but  he 

«  See  p.  242. 


132  PROGRESS  IN  RELIGION 

saved  them  by  the  hand  of  Jeroboam."  5  Whatever  be 
the  historical  value  of  the  detail  added,  it  remains  that 
Jeroboam  II.  was  a  warlike  and  prosperous  prince,  that 
Syria  was  decadent,  and  Israel,  outwardly  at  least, 
flourished  exceedingly  in  his  reign.  But  long  and  suc- 
cessful wars  with  small  neighbours  did  not  build  up  the 
national  strength;  they  told  heavily  on  the  poorer  free- 
men, and  war,  famine  and  plague  left  the  country  all  the 
weaker  to  face  the  Assyrian.6  Twenty  years  of  usurpers 
followed,  and  then  Sargon  took  Samaria;  he  records  how 
he  transported  27,290  of  Israel,  and  the  Hebrew  narra- 
tive adds  how  he  put  foreigners  from  Babylonia  and 
elsewhere  in  their  place  (721  B.C.).  Twenty  years  later 
abject  submission  did  not  save  Hezekiah  of  Judah  from 
seeing  his  land  ravaged,  two  hundred  thousand  of  his 
people  carried  away,  and  his  city  besieged.  How  his  city 
escaped  capture  is  recorded  in  the  book  of  Isaiah  (ch. 
xxxvii.),  and  something  analogous  is  told  by  Herodotus 
(ii.  141).  Meantime  a  new  power  was  rising  in  Egypt. 
Psammetichus,  Herodotus  says  (ii.  152),  received  an 
oracle  that  vengeance  would  come  from  the  sea,  when 
bronzen  men  appeared;  and  they  did  appear — Ionian 
Greeks  and  Carians  in  armour;  and  they  enlisted  in  his 
army  and  remained  the  strength  of  the  Egyptian  forces 
till  Cambyses  conquered  Egypt.  The  Egyptian  king  in 
turn  comes  into  Judah's  story  and  defeats  and  kills 
Josiah  at  the  battle  of  Megiddo  (608).  Herodotus  also 
tells  us  of  Scythian  invaders  of  Asia,  to  whom  Jeremiah 
refers.7  They  spared  Jerusalem,  but  they  were  the  ruin 
of  Assyria.  That  great  nation,  great  in  war  and  con- 
quest, had  worn  itself  out,  and  in  606  B.C.  Nineveh  was 
taken  by  the  Medes.  The  prophet  Nahum  has  a  picture 
of  the  siege  and  the  fall  that  throbs  with  passion.  He 

•  2  Kings  xiv.  27. 

6  Robertson.  Smith,  Prophets,  p.  95. 

7  Herodotus,  i.   104-106;  Jer.  iv.  5-26. 


THE  HEBREW  PROPHETS  133 

sees  the  warriors  in  red,  the  horses  prancing,  the  rush  of 
the  chariots;  and  then: 

The  river-gates  burst  open,  the  palace  dissolves, 

And  Hussab  is  stripped,  is  brought  forth, 

With  her  maids  sobbing  like  doves, 

Beating  their  breasts. 

And  Nineveh !  she  was  like  a  reservoir  of  waters.  .  .  . 

Plunder  silver,  plunder  gold, 

Infinite  treasures,  mass  of  all  precious  things! 

Void  and  dread  and  desolate  is  she.8 

After  Nineveh  came  Babylon,  and  twice  Jerusalem  was 
stripped  of  her  best,  and  the  Babylonish  captivity  began. 

This  is  a  poor,  short  summary  of  great  events.  What 
a  challenge  to  easy  orthodoxy  four  years  of  world-war 
can  make,  we  know;  and  at  no  moment  in  those  years 
were  the  issues  so  awful  for  thinking  men  as  throughout 
the  long  period  we  have  surveyed  in  these  few  para- 
graphs. What  the  condition  of  the  people  was,  with  an 
Assyrian  army  in  the  land,  the  boasts  of  Sargon  and 
Sennacherib  hint.  But  take  things  at  their  best  in  Jero- 
boam's reign,  and  look  at  the  life  that  Amos  describes, 
its  contrasts  of  splendour  and  oppression.  Here  are  the 
rich.  "Ye  that  put  far  away  the  evil  day,  yet  bring  near 
the  reign  of  violence;  that  lie  upon  beds  of  ivory,  and 
stretch  themselves  upon  their  couches,  and  eat  the  lambs 
out  of  the  flock,  and  the  calves  out  of  the  midst  of  the 
stall;  that  sing  idle  songs  to  the  sound  of  the  viol;  that 
improvise  songs  like  David's;  that  drink  wine  in  bowls, 
and  anoint  themselves  with  the  chief  ointments,  but  they 
are  not  grieved  for  the  afflictions  of  Joseph"  (Amos 
vi.  3-6).  And  "they  have  sold  the  righteous  for  silver, 
and  the  needy  for  a  pair  of  shoes,  who  trample  to  the 
dust  the  head  of  the  poor  and  pervert  the  way  of  humble 
men;  they  lay  them  themselves  down  beside  every  altar 

8  G.  A.  Smith,  The  Twelve,  ii.  107,  108;  Nahum,  ii. 


134.  PROGRESS  IN  RELIGION 

upon  clothes  taken  in  pledge,  and  in  the  house  of  their 
God  they  drink  the  wine  of  them  that  have  been  fined" 
(ii.  6-8).  "Gather  upon  the  mount  of  Samaria  and  see! 
Confusions  manifold  in  the  midst  of  her;  violence  to  her 
very  core!  Yea,  they  know  not  how  to  do  uprightness, 
saith  Jehovah,  who  store  up  wrong  and  violence  in  their 
palaces"  (iii.  9,  10).  Religion  flourished  bravely  in  all 
this  time  of  splendour.  Pilgrims  sought  the  shrines,  and 
enjoyed  their  visits  to  them,  with  feasts  and  temple 
women — "whoredom  and  wine  and  new  wine,"  said 
Hosea  (iv.  n).  In  the  south  it  was  much  the  same. 
After  the  fall  of  Israel,  Judah  plunged  uneasily  into 
reformation  and  reaction  by  turns.  If  reformation  failed 
to  get  all  they  wanted  from  Jehovah,  they  would  try 
elsewhere — 

Fleet  ere  si  nequeo  super  os,  Acheronta  movebo. 

The  joyousness  of  the  old  religion  was  gone,  and  men 
turned  to  god  after  god  in  desperation  at  the  national 
outlook ;  their  temper  is  shown  by  their  persecuting.  The 
very  refugees  in  Egypt  tell  Jeremiah  that,  while  they 
burnt  incense  to  the  Queen  of  Heaven,  "then  had  we 
plenty  of  victuals,  and  were  well,  and  saw  no  evil.  But 
since  we  left  off  to  burn  incense  to  the  Queen  of  Heaven, 
and  to  pour  out  drink  offerings  unto  her,  we  have  wanted 
all  things  and  have  been  consumed  by  the  sword  and  by 
the  famine"  (Jer.  xliv.  17,  18). 

Here,  once  again,  we  have  the  factors  which  we  saw 
in  the  Greek  world  after  Homer — saw  or  thought  we 
saw,  for  the  records  were  fewer  and  more  confused;  but 
the  same  Scythians  at  least  were  there,  and  the  same 
upheaval  of  life,  peoples  in  movement,  rich  and  poor  in 
conflict;  and  the  agony  of  a  nation  going  down,  city  by 
city,  before  the  power  of  Lydia — misery,  scepticism  and 
devotion;  and  the  deeper  minds  driven  to  inquire  why 


THE  HEBREW  PROPHETS  135 

Zeus  keeps  his  world  in  such  confusion,  neglects  the 
good,  rewards  the  bad,  and  perplexes  men's  hearts  so 
with  doubt  and  fear.  Something  more  is  asked  of  Zeus, 
and  something  more  is  asked  of  Jehovah,  some  explana- 
tion, some  principle. 

The  Hebrew  prophet  and  the  Greek  philosopher  are 
concerned  with  the  same  problems: 

To  justify  the  ways  of  God  to  men. 

There  are  differences  between  them,  but  there  are  great 
likenesses.     There  is  the  same  emphasis  on  clearness  of 
thought;  the  same   feeling  that  righteousness  matters; 
Homer  "deserved  to  be  whipped  and  driven  out" ; 9  the 
same  instinct  for  a  unity  in  the  world  and  all  its  affairs, 
for  law  and  principle.     The  Greek  seeks  his  way  along 
the  lines  of  a  common  substance  underlying  all  things 
and  a  reign  of  law,  to  the  One  in  Many.     The  intellec- 
tual problem  moves  him  most;  indignation  he  leaves  to 
the  leader  of  the  Demos.     The  Hebrew  is  more  stirred 
by  the  sight  of  moral  wrong,  of  undeserved  suffering, 
and  he  goes  direct  to  Jehovah  and  cries  aloud  for  ex- 
planation.    Neither  is  much  interested  in  cult  or  ritual, 
neither  in  initiations  and  sacramental  revelations.     The 
Greek  reckons  on  reaching  God  by  analysing  God's  in- 
tellectual processes,  mind  discovering  mind  by  natural 
affinity;  the  Hebrew  feels  that  righteousness  is  the  key 
to  understanding  God. 

It  will  be  hard  not  to  digress  into  the  study  of  the 
characters  of  one  or  two  of  the  prophets,  but  that  is 
rather  aside  from  our  purpose.  Something,  however, 
must  be  said  of  the  type  of  the  prophetic  mind.  In  the 
"Cotter's  Saturday  Night"  Burns  speaks  of 

The  rapt  Isaiah's  wild  prophetic  fire; 

•  Heraclitus,  fr.  119  (Bywater);  cited  by  Diog.  Laert,  ix.  i. 


136  PROGRESS  IN  RELIGION 

and  plenty  of  readers  make  nothing  whatever  of  most 
of  the  prophets.  What  threads  or  clues  there  ever  were 
to  the  prophet's  thought — and  such  natures,  it  must  be 
allowed,  drop  their  links — are  obscured  for  us  by  the 
desperate  state  of  the  texts  and  the  blank  inadequacy 
of  word-for-word  translation  to  convey  any  meaning. 
And  then,  in  modern  commentary,  the  rapt  Isaiah  ap- 
pears as  a  shrewd  statesman  and  Amos  as  a  socialist. 
The  fact  is  that  both  Burns  and  the  commentators  are 
right.  The  prophets  are  thinkers  who  will  have  their 
facts  in  clear,  hard  outline,  intelligible  to  the  utmost,  and 
who  insist  on  men  returning  to  facts,  and  facing  them, 
and  thinking  them  out.  But  there  is  another  quality,  or 
faculty,  about  them.  They  do  not  report  facts  they 
have  amassed  and  deductions  they  have  drawn.  They 
are  men — some  of  them,  at  least — of  the  type  upon 
which  a  whole  situation  will  flash  at  once,  like  a  country- 
side in  a  storm  of  lightning  at  night,  men  to  whom  things 
speak — no,  to  whom  God  speaks  Himself  authentically 
and  unmistakably.  The  book  of  Amos  begins:  "The 
words  of  Amos,  who  was  among  the  herdsmen  of  Tekoa, 
which  he  saw";  and  the  third  verse  starts,  "Thus  saith 
Jehovah."  The  point  must  be  remembered,  but  it  should 
not  be  over-emphasised.  In  the  spiritual  ancestry  of 
Amos  are  the  Nebi'im,  men  convinced  of  the  immediacy 
of  their  contact  with  Jehovah.  They  are  not  in  the 
pedigree  of  Heraclitus.  However  we  may  criticise  our 
fathers,  we  inherit  from  them  a  habit  and  a  vocabulary 
which  react  on  each  other. 

"The  characteristic  of  the  true  prophet,"  writes  Rob- 
ertson Smith,10  is  that  he  retains  his  consciousness  and 
self-control  under  revelation."  The  prophets  are  always 
emphasising  knowledge  and  reflection.  "Israel  doth  not 

10  O.  T.  J.  C.,  p.  289. 


THE  HEBREW  PROPHETS  137 

know,  my  people  doth  not  consider,"  says  Isaiah  (i.  3). 
"My  people  perish  for  lack  of  knowledge"  says  Hosea 
(iv.  6),  and  "Ephraim  is  a  silly  dove  without  brains" 
(vii.  n).  They  eliminate  the  irrational  from  all  that 
concerns  religion,  from  intercourse  with  God.  Not 
ghosts,  and  familiar  spirits,  but  God,  says  Isaiah  (viii. 
9).  Not  wizards  that  peep  and  mutter,  not  the  leaping 
and  howling  psychopathic  votaries  of  Baal,  but  men 
sobered  by  the  words  of  God.  God  "speaks  to  his 
prophets,  not  in  magical  processes  or  through  the  visions 
of  poor  frenetics,  but  by  a  clear  intelligible  word  ad- 
dressed to  the  intellect  and  the  heart."  "  "I  have  heard," 
says  God  to  Jeremiah,  "what  the  prophets  have  said,  that 
prophesy  lies  in  my  name  saying,  I  have  dreamed,  I  have 
dreamed — even  the  prophets  of  the  deceit  of  their  own 
heart.  .  .  .  The  prophet  that  hath  a  dream,  let  him  tell 
a  dream;  and  he  that  hath  my  word,  let  him  speak  my 
word  faithfully.  What  is  the  straw  to  the  wheat?  saith 
Jehovah.  Is  not  my  word  like  as  fire?  saith  Jehovah; 
and  like  a  hammer  that  breaketh  the  rock  in  pieces?" 
(Jer.  xxiii.  25-29).  The  mark  of  the  prophet  is  that 
he  will,  in  Cromwell's  great  phrase,  "speak  things." 
"It  is  a  fundamental  principle  with  us,"  wrote  John 
Wesley,  "that  to  renounce  reason  is  to  renounce 
religion,  that  reason  and  religion  go  hand  in  hand,  and 
that  all  irrational  religion  is  false  religion."  13 

Such  a  habit  does  not  lead  to  the  easy  solution  of  prob- 
lems; it  is  rather  apt  to  multiply  them,  for  clearness 
always  emphasises  our  ignorance.  In  a  passage  that  re- 
calls one  we  have  seen  of  Theognis,  Habakkuk  13  asks 
the  same  urgent  question,  in  weariness  and  perplexity : — 

How  long,  O  Jehovah,  have  I  called?  and  Thou  nearest  not. 
I  cry  to  Thee,  Wrong !  and  Thou  sendest  no  help. 

11  O.  T.  J,  C.,  p.  289. 

12  Quoted  by  Davenport,  Primitive  Traits  in  Religious  Revivals,  p.   145. 

13  Hab.  i.  2,  3,  12,  13. 


138  PROGRESS  IN  RELIGION 

Why  dost  Thou  make  me  to  look  upon  sorrow, 
And  fill  mine  eyes  with  trouble?  .  .  . 
•Art  not  Thou  of  old,  Jehovah,  my  God,  my  Holy  One, 
Purer  of  eyes  than  to  behold  evil, 
And  that  canst  not  gaze  upon  trouble? 
Why  gazest  thou  upon  traitors? 

Why  art  thou  silent,  when  the  wicked  swallows  him  that  is 
more  righteous  than  he? 

His  contemporary,  Jeremiah,  deals  with  God  as  ex- 
plicitly: "Righteous  art  thou,  O  Jehovah,  when  I  plead 
with  thee;  yet  would  I  reason  the  cause  with  thee. 
Wherefore  doth  the  way  of  the  wicked  prosper  ?  Where- 
fore are  all  they  at  ease,  that  deal  very  treacherously?" 
(xii.  i).  In  very  striking  words  Habakkuk  answers 
himself;  he  will,  in  modern  phrase,  take  a  wider  outlook, 
he  will  take  time  and  trouble  to  know. 

Upon  my  watch-tower  I  will  stand, 

And  take  my  post  on  the  rampart. 

I  will  watch  to  see  what  he  will  say  to  me, 

And  what  answer  I  get  back  to  my  plea. 

Hesiod,  as  we  saw,  speaks  of  the  Muses  meeting  him 
and  speaking  to  him;  and  this  was  the  source  of  his 
matter-of-fact  poetry.  But  one  wonders  what  element 
of  inspiration  at  all  lies  behind  the  pleasant  story;  is  it 
just  an  amplified  imitation  of  Homer's  invocation?  The 
Hebrew  prophets  speak  of  a  call  of  God  Himself  as  the 
ground  of  their  action  in  going  with  His  message  to 
their  people.  Isaiah  tells  us  how  he  saw  Jehovah  high 
and  lifted  up,  and  how  the  sight  filled  him  with  a 
sense  of  his  own  uncleanness  (Isa.  vi.  1-5).  There 
is  no  gay  adaptation  of  the  conventional  about  that;  it 
is  a  story  wrung  from  the  heart.  Jeremiah  confesses 
to  having  resisted  the  call;  he  was  not  the  man  for  the 
task,  a  mere  child;  but  he  had  to  obey — and  obedience 
again  and  again,  we  can  see,  meant  misery  and  humilia- 


THE  HEBREW  PROPHETS  139 

tion  to  that  gentle  and  sensitive  spirit  (Jer.  i.  6;  xx.  9). 
Amos  in  a  brief  parallelism  (iii.  8)  says  simply:  "The 
lion  hath  roared,  who  will  not  fear;  the  God  Jehovah 
has  spoken,  who  can  but  prophesy?"  And  in  a  memo- 
rable and  vividly-drawn  scene  he  tells  the  priest  at  Bethel 
that  prophecy  was  no  trade  of  his;  he  was  a  herdsman; 
but  he  had  no  choice;  "the  Lord  took  me"  (vii.  14).  It 
is  hard  to  imagine  experience  more  authentic  in  the  his- 
tory of  religion;  there  is  nothing  psychopathic  here,  the 
men  are  what  Carlyle  called  "sons  of  fact";  they  draw 
their  materials  from  "conscience  and  history."  14 

The  habit  of  seeing  fact  and  of  basing  oneself  on  prin- 
ciple is  not  yet  so  common  that  we  should  suppose  the 
prophets  to  be  representative  men.  I  have  heard  a  min- 
ister praised  as  "more  sympathetic  to  the  common  opin- 
ions of  the  day"  than  another — a  eulogy  which  it  is 
notorious  the  great  prophets  never  achieved,  and  never 
sought.  "Behold,  now,"  said  an  envoy  of  the  court  to 
an  earlier  prophet,  "the  words  of  the  prophets  declare 
good  unto  the  king  with  one  mouth ;  let  thy  word,  I  pray 
thee,  be  like  the  word  of  one  of  them  and  speak  that 
which  is  good."  15  "As  Jehovah  liveth,  what  Jehovah 
saith  unto  me,  that  will  I  speak,"  is  the  answer,  and  it 
is  the  badge  of  all  his  tribe.  They  are  pioneers,  who 
penetrate  to  the  mind  of  God;  and  the  common  opinions 
of  the  day  are  irrelevant.  They  were  not  popular,  but 
neither  was  Socrates.  "The  possession  of  a  single  true 
thought  about  Jehovah,"  says  Robertson  Smith,16  "not 
derived  from  current  religious  teaching,  but  springing 
up  in  the  soul  as  a  word  from  Jehovah  Himself,  is 
enough  to  constitute  a  prophet,  and  lay  on  him  the  duty 
of  speaking  to  Israel  what  he  has  learned  of  Israel's 
God."  This  brings  us  to  the  teaching  of  the  prophets, 

l4Marzini,  quoted  by  G.  A.  Smith,  The  Twelve,  i.  p.  89. 

is  i   Kings  xxii.   13,   14. 

l«  Prophets  of  Israel,  p.  182. 


140  PROGRESS  IN  RELIGION 

to  those  ideas  of  God  which  they  set  forth  and  which  to 
some  extent  were  assimilated  in  the  thought  and  life  of 
Israel,  though  not  wholly — ideas  which  in  spite  of  the 
teaching  of  Jesus  himself  are  still  very  largely  foreign 
to  the  minds  of  men,  unintelligible  and  repugnant. 

Let  us  start  with  Amos,  with  whom  the  roll  of  the 
great  prophets  begins.  From  the  wilderness  of  Tekoa, 
the  very  verge  of  civilisation,  he  suddenly  appears  at 
Bethel,  the  holy  place  of  Northern  Israel,  and  he  makes 
a  series  of  announcements  from  Jehovah — startling  in 
their  character  and  impressive  in  their  form.  "Thus 
saith  Jehovah :  For  three  transgressions  of  Damascus 
and  for  four,  I  will  not  turn  it  back."  What  was  it"? 
There  is  something  that  moves  in  the  vague  Quos  ego 
of  the  formula,  which  comes  with  each  doom.  Twenty 
years  later  the  Assyrians  explained  what  it  was.  "The 
people  of  Syria  shall  go  into  captivity."  A  judgment 
upon  Syria  was  not  a  message  to  trouble  Israel.  The 
prophet  went  on :  "Thus  saith  Jehovah :  For  three  trans- 
gressions of  Gaza  and  for  four,  I  will  not  turn  it  back 
.  .  .  the  remnant  of  the  Philistines  shall  perish."  Still 
a  message  likely  to  be  popular,  for  these  were  the  heredi- 
tary enemies,  North  and  South.  Then  came  the  turn  of 
Tyre,  a  slave-trading  town  like  Gaza,  selling  human 
beings  in  herds  to  Arabia  and  to  the  west;  and  then  of 
Edom  and  Ammon;  and  then  Moab;  and  always  the 
same  prelude,  "For  three  transgressions  and  for  four," 
and  always  the  same  awful  menace,  "I  will  not  turn  it 
back" — a  stirring  series  of  God's  judgments,  good  to 
hear,  good  to  dwell  upon — but  the  prophet  was  not  done. 

"Thus  saith  Jehovah :  For  three  transgressions  of 
Judah  and  for  four,  I  will  not  turn  it  back."  1T  Judah, 
too,  was  an  enemy  from  time  to  time;  but  let  us  hear 
the  sins  of  Judah.  The  sins  of  the  other  peoples  were 

17  Some  critics  think  the  doom  upon  Judah  a  later  addition  here. 


THE  HEBREW  PROPHETS 

the  common  barbarities  and  treacheries  of  Semitic  war- 
fare— mere  outrages  on  humanitarianism.  It  was  odd 
perhaps  that  Jehovah  should  be  so  squeamish,  especially 
when,  in  the  case  of  Moab,  it  was  Edom  and  not  Israel 
that  suffered.  But  what  had  Judah  done?  "They  de^ 
spised  the  law  of  Jehovah ;  his  statutes  they  did  not  ob- 
serve; their  false  gods  led  them  astray.  But  I  will  send 
fire  upon  Judah  and  it  shall  devour  the  palaces  of  Jeru- 
salem." And  then,  "Thus  saith  Jehovah:  For  three 
transgressions  of  Israel  and  for  four,  I  will  not  turn  it 
back.  They  sell  the  honest  man  for  silver,  the  poor  man 
for  a  pair  of  shoes;  they  trample  to  the  dust  of  the  earth 
the  head  of  the  poor  and  pervert  the  way  of  the  humble 
folk.  A  man  and  his  father  will  go  in  to  the  same  temple- 
woman,  to  profane  my  holy  name.  By  every  altar  they 
lay  themselves  down  on  garments  given  in  pledge,  and 
the  wine  of  those  that  have  been  fined,  they  drink  in  the 
house  of  their  God"  (ii.  6-8).  So  doom,  the  prophet 
thinks,  is  to  come  upon  Israel,  for  a  mere  matter  of 
social  righteousness. 

The  most  brilliantly  civilised  of  Greek  states,  when  she 
sacked  Melos,  Histiaea,  Scione,  Torone,  A'egina — and, 
the  historian  adds,  many  other  towns  of  the  Greeks — 
killed  the  men  and  sold  the  women  and  children  for 
slaves,  and  when  she  fell,  it  came  home  to  her  what  she 
had  done:  "that  night  no  man  slept."  Plato  deprecated 
such  treatment  of  Greeks  by  Greeks;  it  might  serve  for 
barbarians.  Amos  drags  it  into  the  cognisance  of  Je- 
hovah; it  matters  to  Jehovah — this  common  usage  of 
war  which  all  states  understand  and  practise  when  they 
can.  "They  sold  the  captives ;  they  ripped  up  the  women 
with  child — to  enlarge  their  territory."  And  God,  Amos 
says,  judges, — "I  will  not  turn  it  back."  More  still,  for 
barbarity  in  war  is  not  charged  against  Israel  at  this 
point — we  know  that  David  practised  it — Jehovah  is  con- 


142  PROGRESS  IN  RELIGION 

cerned  with  the  oppression  of  the  poor,  with  the  cold 
and  hunger  to  which  the  needy  are  exposed,  with  the  lust 
and  uncleanness  associated  with  His  temples.  He  has 
His  eye  upon  the  palaces  where  the  great  "store  up  vio- 
lence and  robbery,"  on  the  tribunals  and  the  judges  with 
itching  palms.  And  all  the  piety  and  devotion  of  His 
people  go  for  nothing — for  less  than  nothing,  for  they 
anger  Him.  "Come  to  Bethel,"  He  says  in  irony;  "come 
to  Bethel  and  sin;  come  to  Gilgal  and  multiply  transgres- 
sion! Every  morning  your  sacrifices,  every  three  days 
your  tithes!  and  offer  a  sacrifice  of  thanksgiving" 
(iv.  4).  "I  hate,  I  despise  your  feast-days,  and  I  will 
not  smell  your  sacrifices  in  solemn  assembly.  Though 
you  offer  me  burnt-offerings  and  meat  offerings,  I  will 
not  accept  them;  your  thank-offerings  of  fatted  calves, 
I  will  not  look  at  them.  Take  thou  away  from  me  the 
noise  of  the  songs;  for  I  will  not  hear  the  melody  of 
thy  viols"  (v.  21-23). 

We  have  remarked  among  Greek  thinkers — and  per- 
haps more  still  is  it  to  be  remarked  among  the  plain 
people  of  Greece,  men  who  loved  their  wives  and  daugh- 
ters, and  gave  themselves  to  making  men  of  their  boys — 
an  instinct  which  grows  slowly  to  a  conviction,  that 
morality  and  religion  do  belong  together,  that  Zeus  must 
be  just,  that  the  gods  must  be  clean.  To  that  feeling  in 
Greece  we  shall  return  at  a  later  point.  But,  after  all,  in 
Greece  the  conviction  grows  slowly;  it  comes  up  like  a 
quiet  tide.  In  Amos  it  sweeps  upon  Israel  like  the  inrush 
of  the  whole  sea  at  once  after  an  earthquake.  Religion? 
Jehovah  hates  and  despises  your  religion;  smell  and 
smoke  and  tinkling  tunes,  and  robbery  and  uncleanness. 
He  is  not  interested  in  priests  and  shrines  and  rituals. 


From  vice,  oppression  and  despair 
God  save  the  people  \ 


THE  HEBREW  PROPHETS  143 

Plato  and  Arnos  reach  the  same  point.  Religion  without 
morality  is  a  lie,  and  Gods  damns  it.  Plato's  subject  in 
that  sentence  may  be  vague  or  plural,  but  the  predicate 
is  definite  enough.  With  Amos  it  is  the  subject  that  has 
all  the  emphasis,  terrible  as  the  predicates  are ;  "thus  saith 
Jehovah."  "Woe  unto  you  that  desire  the  day  of  Je- 
hovah !  to  what  end  is  it  for  you  ?  The  day  of  Jehovah 
is  darkness  and  not  light;  very  dark,  and  no  brightness 
in  it." 

It  is  little  wonder  that  Amaziah,  the  priest  of  Bethel, 
was  for  sending  Amos  away.  "O  thou  seer,  go,  flee  thee 
away  into  the  land  of  Judah,  and  there  eat  bread  [there 
the  priest  speaks  by  his  trade]  ;  prophesy  there.  But 
prophesy  not  any  more  at  Bethel;  for  it  is  the  king's 
chapel  and  it  is  the  king's  court"  (vii.  12,  13).  And 
with  the  doom  of  that  priest  the  personal  history  of 
Amos  ends.  But  his  clear  association,  his  identification 
of  religion  with  morality,  rings  on  through  all  the  great 
religious  teachers  of  Israel — for  Israel  and  for  all  who 
hear. 

Ethics,  however,  are  very  well  in  the  abstract,  but  the 
issue  lies  always  with  religion;  that  at  least  is  practical. 
And  in  religion,  all  turns  on  how  men  conceive  of  God. 
Without  attempting  to  deal  with  the  prophets  in  detail, 
any  more  than  elsewhere  with  the  poets  and  philosophers, 
let  us  push  to  the  conclusion  of  the  whole  matter — what 
do  they  make,  individually  and  collectively,  of  Jehovah? 

The  first  point  to  be  noted  is  made  appallingly  clear  by 
Amos.  He  links  Israel  with  Gaza  and  with  Tyre  for 
judgment,  in  one  and  the  same  formula.  Jehovah  is  not 
tied  to  Israel.  "Are  you  not  as  the  negroes,  the  children 
of  Ethiopia,  unto  me,  O  children  of  Israel?  saith  Je- 
hovah. Did  not  I  bring  up  Israel  out  of  Egypt?  Yes, 
and  the  Philistines  from  Crete,  and  the  Syrians  from 
Kir"  (Amos  ix.  7).  This  was  to  give  the  lie  direct  to 


144  PROGRESS  IN  RELIGION 

all  early  notions  of  the  inter-dependence  of  god  and 
tribe.  Jehovah  can  do  without  Israel — a  terrific  dis- 
covery, and  a  very  unpatriotic  one.  It  is  remarked  that 
Amos  never  calls  Jehovah  "God  of  Israel" ;  He  is  God 
of  Hosts.18  Amos  has  little  hope  of  Israel;  "hate  the 
evil  and  love  the  good ;  it  may  perchance  be  that  Jehovah, 
the  God  of  hosts,  shall  be  with  you,  as  you  say"  (v.  14). 
They  said  so,  and  here  is  Jehovah's  reply,  detached 
enough :  "You  only  have  I  known  of  all  the  families  of 
the  earth.  Therefore  I  will  punish  you  for  your  in- 
iquities. Can  two  walk  together,  except  they  be 
agreed?"  (iii.  2).  The  covenant  of  Jehovah  with  Israel 
had  apparently  two  sides;  there  was  a  predominant 
partner.  And  Jehovah,  as  we  saw,  will  punish  Moab  for 
what  Moab  did  to  the  doomed  people  of  Edom  (ii.  i). 
The  prophets  look  further  afield  than  the  patriots.  Isaiah 
recognises  in  Assyria  a  tool  of  Jehovah's — it  is  difficult 
for  us  to  grasp  the  extreme  daring  of  the  thought,  the 
bold  extension  of  Jehovah's  sovereignty  far  outside  His 
own  land,  and  the  insight  that  subordinates  the  intoler- 
able menace  of  Assyria  to  the  purposes  of  God.  The 
language  is  contemptuous  beyond  translation:  "In  the 
same  day  shall  Jehovah  shave  with  a  razor  that  is  hired 
— viz.  the  king  of  Assyria — the  head  and  the  hair  of  the 
feet,  and  it  shall  also  consume  the  beard"  (Isa.  vii.  20). 
Ezekiel,  in  language  of  more  sympathy,  says  of  the  next 
great  oppressor  of  Israel,  that  Jehovah  announces :  "I 
will  strengthen  the  arms  of  the  king  of  Babylon,  and  the 
arms  of  Pharaoh  shall  fall  down,  and  they  shall  know 
that  I  am  Jehovah,  when  I  shall  put  my  sword  into  the 
hand  of  the  king  of  Babylon,  and  he  shall  stretch  it  out 
upon  the  land  of  Egypt"  (Ezek.  xxx.  25).  Later  on, 
the  second  Isaiah  hails  Cyrus:  "Thus  saith  Jehovah  to 
his  anointed,  to  Cyrus,  whose  right  hand  I  have  holden, 

18  Wellhausen,  Prolegomena,  p.  472. 


THE  HEBREW  PROPHETS  145 

to  subdue  the  nations  before  him.  ...  I  will  go  before 
thee  to  make  the  crooked  places  straight,  I  will  break  in 
pieces  the  gates  of  brass  and  cut  in  sunder  the  bars  of 
iron  .  .  .  for  Jacob  my  servant's  sake,  I  have  called  thee 
by  name,  though  thou  hast  not  known  me.  I  am  Jehovah, 
and  there  is  none  else;  there  is  no  God  beside  me"  (Isa. 
xlv.  1-5).  Small  wonder  the  early  Christian  read  nvpiot 
for  xvpoS  and  applied  the  great  language  to  another. 
Amos  struck  the  keynote,  and  the  crown  of  all  is  in  that 
second  Isaiah : 19  "Have  ye  not  known  ?  have  ye  not 
heard?  hath  it  not  been  told  you  from  the  beginning? 
have  ye  not  understood  from  the  foundations  of  the 
earth?  He  that  is  enthroned  above  the  circle  of  the 
earth  and  its  inhabitants  are  as  grasshoppers,  that 
stretcheth  out  the  heavens  as  a  curtain,  and  spreadeth 
them  out  to  dwell  in.  Behold,  the  nations  are  as  a  drop 
of  a  bucket,  and  are  counted  as  the  small  dust  of  the 
balance;  behold,  he  taketh  up  the  isles  as  a  very  little 
thing;  he  hath  measured  the  waters  in  the  hollow  of  his 
hand.  Lift  up  your  eyes  on  high,  and  behold  who  hath 
created  these  stars,  that  bringeth  out  their  host  by  num- 
ber :  he  calleth  them  all  by  names  by  the  greatness  of  his 
power;  not  one  faileth.  Why  sayest  thou,  O  Jacob,  My 
way  is  hid  from  Jehovah?  Hast  thou  not  known,  hast 
thou  not  heard,  that  the  everlasting  God,  Jehovah,  the 
Creator  of  the  ends  of  the  earth,  fainteth  not,  neither  is 
weary?  there  is  no  searching  of  his  understanding." 

"The  sun  will  not  transgress  bounds;  or  else  the 
Erinnyes,  avengers  of  Justice,  will  find  him  out,"  said 
Heraclitus20  about  this  time,  using  the  language  of  old 
poetry  to  express  the  reign  of  law,  for  "Nature  loves  to 
be  hid."  21  The  Hebrew  boldly  asserts  the  personal  rule 

19  Verses  not  quite  in  order,  from  Isaiah  xl. 

20  Heraclitus,    fr.    94    (Diels,    Vorsokvatiker,   i.    p.    75);    fr.    29    (Bywater); 
Plutarch,  de  exilio,  ii.  p.  604. 

21  Heraclitus,  fr.  123  (Diels);  fr.  10   (Bywater). 


146  PROGRESS  IN  RELIGION 

of  Jehovah,  and  we  have  seen  how  the  prophets  have 
built  up  that  personality — how  it  has  been  revealed  to 
them,  they  would  say.  Jehovah,  as  Amos  saw,  stands 
for  law  and  for  morality;  for  the  great  law  that  sways 
sun  and  star,  as  the  second  Isaiah  saw,  and  for  a  greater 
law  in  accordance  with  which  He  punishes — He  and  no 
mere  Erinnyes — the  nation  and  the  man  who  do  evil  and 
call  it  holiness,  who  omit  to  see  justice  and  dream  that 
religion  can  matter  without  it.  He  is,  as  Habakkuk  of 
the  Watchtower  said,  "of  purer  eyes  than  to  behold  evil, 
and  cannot  look  upon  iniquity"  (Ha.  i.  15).  The  He- 
brew, however,  knew  the  shrinking  of  the  Greek  from  a 
crude  anthropomorphism.  The  Elohist,  we  are  told,22 
reaches  a  higher  level  of  reflection  than  the  Jehovist  in 
dealing  with  the  old  legends  of  his  people ;  he  tones  down 
his  theophanies,  he  has  a  more  spiritual  conception  of 
revelation,  while  on  the  human  side  he  strikes  a  deeper 
vein  of  subjective  feeling;  he  finds  the  sense  of  tears  in 
things,  feels  the  appeal  of  tenderness,  and  is  more  careful 
in  his  treatment  of  right  and  wrong.  Both  varieties  of 
sensitiveness  are  felt  in  the  prophets,  and  they  escape 
the  depersonalising  tendency  that  undid  philosophic  re- 
ligion among  the  Greeks,  because  that  sense  of  the  pathos 
of  human  life  never  leaves  them.  "Thou  shalt  love 
Jehovah  thy  God"  is  the  eventual  Hebrew  religion.  Not 
so  spoke  the  Greek.  "Friendship  or  love,"  says  Aris- 
totle,23 "we  speak  of  where  there  is  return  of  love;  but 
love  of  God  admits  neither  return  of  love  nor  indeed  love 
at  all.  For  it  would  be  an  odd  sort  of  thing  if  a  man 
were  to  say  he  loved  Zeus."  It  would,  indeed;  but  Je- 
hovah was  thought  of  on  other  lines.  And  this  began 
in  earnest  with  Hosea,  one  of  the  most  remarkable  of 

22  Skinner,  Genesis,  pp.  liii.  and  xlvii. 

23  Aristotle,  Magn.  Mor.,  ii.  n,  1208  b.,  28  ff. 


THE  HEBREW  PROPHETS  147 

the  prophets.     Hosea  and  Jeremiah  may  be  called  the 
tenderest  spirits  in  Hebrew  religion. 

It  is  not  necessary  to  tell  again  the  dreadful  story  of 
Hosea,  more  miserable  and  more  splendid  as  one  feels 
one's  way  into  it.  He  has  the  prophet's  habit  of  basing 
himself  on  fact,  and  an  eye  for  nature  comparable  to  that 
which  we  find  in  Jeremiah  and  in  the  parables  of  Jesus. 
It  is  remarkable  that  he  was,  it  would  appear,  the  first 
to  observe  the  effect  of  national  licentiousness  in  dimin- 
ishing population.2*  He  was  also  a  psychologist,  and  to 
some  effect,  who  read  deeply  in  the  human  heart.  He 
found  that  his  wife  was  unable  to  stand  alone,  too  animal 
a  nature  to  choose  purity  or  too  weak  to  hold  to  a  re- 
solve; that  she  lacked  character  and  personality;  and 
that  her  one  chance  lay  in  his  helping  her,  not  once, 
but  always;  that  if  he  let  her  go,  there  lay  nothing 
before  her  but  ever  deeper  infamy.  He  found,  too, 
that  he  himself  was  not  unwilling  to  help  her;  that 
he  could  not,  in  fact,  do  anything  else;  that  he  could 
not  let  her  go;  that  he  could  forgive  her  and  keep 
her  whatever  she  had  done.  He  asked,  it  would  seem, 
whence  came  these  feelings  ?  And  he  drew  the  greatest 
of  all  inferences — that  Jehovah  Himself,  Maker  of  all, 
is  the  source  of  tenderness,  that  Jehovah  must  therefore 
be  good  and  tender  beyond  man's  dream.  He  applied 
this  to  Israel — to  Israel  unable  to  stand  alone,  to  be  true 
or  loyal,  ever  in  need  of  fresh  forgiveness  and  of  per- 
petual support.  "How  can  I  give  thee  up,  Ephraim?" 
he  hears  Jehovah  say.  "How  can  I  cast  thee  away, 
Israel  ?  My  heart  burns  within  me,  my  compassion  is  all 
kindled.  I  will  not  execute  the  fierceness  of  my  wrath, 
I  will  not  turn  to  destroy  thee;  for  I  am  God  and  not 
man,  the  Holy  One  in  the  midst  of  thee"  (xi.  8  f.). 

24  G.  A.  Smith,  The  Twelve,  i.  pp.  233,  384;  Hosea  ix.   n,  14,  16. 


148  PROGRESS  IN  RELIGION 

"O  Israel,  return  unto  Jehovah  thy  God.  ...  I  will  heal 
their  backsliding,  I  will  love  them  freely,  for  mine  anger 
is  turned  away  from  him.  I  will  be  as  the  dew  to  Israel ; 
he  shall  bud  forth  as  the  lily  and  strike  his  roots  as  Leb- 
anon" (xiv.  i  f.).  "O  Israel,  thou  hast  destroyed  thy- 
self, but  in  me  is  thy  help"  (xiii.  9).  The  language  is  so 
extraordinarily  personal  that  it  is  hard  to  realise  that  it 
is  addressed  not  to  an  individual  but  to  Israel,  to  the 
nation.  The  fuller  place  of  the  individual  in  the  thoughts 
of  Jehovah  comes  with  Jeremiah. 

Hosea,  however,  is  a  pioneer  in  the  exploration  of 
God,  who  has  marked  several  points  which  remain  for 
ever.  He  was  the  first  of  the  prophets  to  recognise  the 
malign  significance  of  idols.  To  Amos  the  calves  were  a 
part  of  that  cult  which  he  saw  that  Jehovah  despised.  To 
Hosea  they  are  symbols  of  apostasy — "and  now  they 
sin  more  and  more,  and  have  made  them  molten  images 
of  their  silver,  even  idols  according  to  their  own  under- 
standing, all  of  them  the  work  of  the  craftsmen;  they 
say  of  them,  Let  the  men  that  sacrifice  kiss  the  calves" 
(xiii.  2).  With  the  horrible  symbolism  before  him,  in 
which  the  ancient  religion  expressed  the  relation  of  heaven 
and  earth,  rites  of  fertility,  and  with  his  own  domestic 
parable  in  his  heart,  he  uses  the  metaphor  of  marriage  to 
describe  the  union  of  Jehovah  and  Israel,  and  in  the  idols 
he  sees  the  lovers  for  whom  Jehovah's  wife  has  forsaken 
him  and  "played  the  harlot"  (iv.  15,  17). 

He  was,  further,  the  first  teacher  of  repentance.  This 
involved  a  new  treatment  of  the  whole  question  of  Sin — 
a  subject  on  which  the  contribution  of  Israel  to  the 
thought  of  mankind  is  incomparably  richer  than  that  of 
Greece,  and  only  approached  by  that  of  early  Roman 
Christianity.  The  Greek  practically  omitted  Sin,  like 
M.  Renan ; 26  and  when  he  put  his  mind  to  it,  he  treated 

25  See  p.    58. 


THE  HEBREW  PROPHETS  149 

it  in  two  ways.  Sin  might  be  a  meddling  with  the  whims 
and  fancies  of  a  divine  or  daemonic  being  of  no  moral 
qualities  whatever;  or  it  might  be  a  blunder  which  in- 
volved a  man  in  consequences  entailed  by  a  breach  of  laws 
quite  impersonal,  as  a  short-sighted  man's  stumble  may 
entail  breakage  of  bone  or  wrenching  of  muscle  as  a 
result  of  man's  natural  construction  and  the  hardness 
(let  us  say)  of  stone  steps.  In  neither  was  the  act  of 
much  import  apart  from  its  consequence ;  it  did  not  carry 
the  whole  man  with  it;  and  it  did  not,  apart  from  dae- 
mons, bring  him  into  collision  with  another  personality — 
and  the  daemons  which  might  have  to  be  reconciled  were 
only  partly  personal,  much  less  so  than  the  man  himself. 
The  Stoic,  indeed,  coined  the  word  "conscience,"  but  it 
was  a  religion  of  Hebrew  ancestry  that  used  it.  The 
Hebrew,  where  Hosea  led  the  way,  conceived  sin  as  an 
attitude  of  mind,  apostasy,  "harlotry"  in  the  phrase  of 
Hosea,  and  on  either  side  saw  a  genuine  personality.  If 
"Israel"  is  not  quite  personal,  the  stories  of  the  call  of 
Isaiah  and  Jeremiah  show  strongly  the  emergence  of 
the  individual. 

Sin  is,  then,  for  the  Hebrew  an  attitude  of  mind  de- 
termining conduct  toward  God.  The  whole  situation  is 
changed  by  the  emphasis  on  the  personality  of  God;  it 
is  further  changed  by  the  strong  conviction  that  God  is 
righteous  and  moral,  which  the  common  gods  of  Greece 
never  were;  the  third  development  follows,  when  Hosea 
brings  forward,  as  a  necessary  implicate  of  God's  per- 
sonality, His  personal  affection  for  His  own,  His  tender- 
ness and  His  yearning  desire  to  have  His  own  again. 
"How  can  I  let  thee  go?"  Sin  stands  in  a  clearer  light 
than  ever  before,  interpreted  by  this  psychologist  who 
could  not  get  over  his  love  for  a  disastrous  wife.  Re- 
pentance, then,  is  a  change  of  mind — and  that  is  one 
reason  why  Hosea  so  constantly  emphasises  knowing  and 


150  PROGRESS  IN  RELIGION 

not-knowing  and  understanding.  Israel  has  "rejected 
knowledge"  (iv.  6)  and  "the  people  that  doth  not  under- 
stand shall  be  overthrown"  (iv.  14).  And  his  appeal 
is :  "Oh,  Israel,  return  unto  Jehovah  thy  God  .  .  .  take 
with  you  words  and  return  unto  Jehovah;  say  unto  him, 
Take  away  all  iniquity  and  accept  that  which  is  good; 
so  will  we  render  as  bullocks  the  offering  of  our  lips" 
(xiv.  i) — a  change  of  attitude  which  means  a  new  type 
of  religion,  not  one  of  external  gifts,  of  slain  bullocks, 
of  blood  out-poured  and  incense  burnt,  but  one  where 
the  inner  man  meets  God  face  to  face — a  change  of  atti- 
tude which  involves  an  entire  re-modelling  of  conduct 
and  makes  it  possible  for  Jehovah  to  give  in  the  spirit 
and  on  the  scale  which  the  prophet  sees  to  be  His  desire. 
Hosea  is  the  forerunner  of  the  New  Testament  doctrine 
of  Grace — the  "greatest  of  all  Catholic  doctrines,"  as 
Renan  said. 

The  contrast  of  all  this  with  the  highest  thought  upon 
God  that  we  find  among  the  Greeks  is  more  remarkable 
as  we  study  it  more.  Once  again  I  find  it  hard  to  dis- 
cover anything  like  it  in  the  earlier  history  of  Jehovah- 
worship,  as  it  is  generally  described.  Even  if  the  later 
developments  are  in  the  traditional  way  put  down  to 
Abraham  and  his  age,  the  change  of  century  does  not 
make  the  facts  less  strange.  The  whole  habit  of  mind 
and  outlook  of  Hosea  and  Jeremiah  is  irreconcilable  with 
the  conceptions  on  which  early  religion  as  a  rule  rested; 
and  one  feels  the  justice  of  Professor  Barton's  conclu- 
sion, already  quoted,  that  the  moral  standards  of  the 
prophets  and  their  conceptions  of  God  are  not  accounted 
for  by  their  environments.26 

The  slow  recognition  of  human  personality  was  one 
point  in  which  we  saw  that  the  Hebrew  differed  from 
the  Greek  —  and  very  surprisingly.  One  wonders 

26  P.  109;  Barton,  Semitic  Origins,  p.  306. 


THE  HEBREW  PROPHETS  151 

whether  the  scholars  can  be  right  who  assure  us  so  def- 
initely that  all  the  messages  of  Jehovah  are  for  the  na- 
tion. It  is  quite  clear  at  last  that  the  individual  had  his 
messages  too.  The  call  of  the  prophet  is  as  intensely  an 
individual  transaction  as  a  proposal  of  marriage  to-day. 
It  is  inconceivable  that  Jehovah,  with  such  a  character 
of  tenderness  as  Hosea  draws,  could  call  a  man  and  use 
a  man,  and  have  no  further  interest  in  him.  That  point 
is  made  good  by  Jeremiah,  whose  whole  life  is,  in  a  way, 
a  dialogue  with  Jehovah.  In  the  long  run,  he  extends  the 
relation  of  Jehovah  to  every  man,  and  two  things  may 
be  traced  as  contributing  to  this.  His  own  personal  re- 
ligious life,  a  deeply  individual  life  of  battle,  despair  and 
divine  grace  and  re-consecration,  will  take  him  a  long 
way.  Jeremiah,  too,  like  Amos,  saw  that  God  is  not  tied 
to  people  or  place — if  He  can  do  without  Israel,  He 
can  do  without  Judah.  If  Jerusalem  escaped  Senna- 
cherib, it  is  not  necessarily  sound  thinking  to  talk  on 
about  "the  temple  of  the  Lord,  the  temple  of  the  Lord, 
the  temple  of  the  Lord"  2r  (Jeremiah's  iterations  are  not 
accidental).  Jehovah  can  do  without  His  temple;  He  is 
not  dependent  on  Jerusalem.  Temple  and  tower  may  go 
to  the  ground,  and  Israel  may  go  into  exile.  Amos  told 
the  priest  he  would  die  "in  a  polluted  land";  for  Jere- 
miah there  is  no  polluted  land;  he  sees  that  the  religion 
of  Jehovah  is  detachable  from  Jerusalem : — 

Where'er  we  meet  Thee,  Thou  art  found 
And  every  place  is  hallowed  ground. 

Yes !  and  it  is  detachable  from  race  as  well  as  from  place. 
God  has,  in  a  sense,  failed  with  Israel.  Israel  will  not 
have  Jehovah.  But  is  Jehovah  baulked  of  his  purpose  by 
a  foolish  people?  Amos  thought  not.  Sheer  ruin,  fail- 
ure, disaster  and  collapse  are  the  drastic  teachers  of 

27jcr.  vii.  4. 


152  PROGRESS  IN  RELIGION 

Jeremiah ;  they  drive  him  into  deeper  and  deeper  research 
into  the  ways  of  Jehovah.  He  discovers  the  individual  to 
foe  the  key  to  God's  thoughts.  Men  talked  of  people  and 
of  family — the  life  of  Israel,  the  continuity  and  unity 
of  the  family.  Their  proverb  ran  that  "The  fathers  have 
eaten  sour  grapes,  and  the  children's  teeth  are  set  on 
edge"  (Jer.  xxxi.  29).  Jeremiah  denied  it — "every  man 
that  eateth  sour  grapes,  his  teeth  shall  be  set  on  edge" ; 
and  then  Re  goes  on  to  unfold  what  is  implied  in  this 
new  individuality  of  the  individual.  The  passage  which 
follows  has  had  a  great  history  in  religion  and  in  litera- 
ture, and  gave  its  name  to  the  most  famous  of  all  books 
some  centuries  later;  for  its  meaning  was  seen  at  last. 

"Behold,  the  days  come,  saith  Jehovah,  that  I  will 
make  a  new  covenant  with  the  house  of  Israel  and  with 
the  house  of  Judah,  not  according  to  the  covenant  that 
I  made  with  their  fathers,  in  the  day  that  I  took  them 
by  the  hand,  to  bring  them  out  of  the  land  of  Egypt; 
which  my  covenant  they  brake,  although  I  was  an  hus- 
band unto  them,  saith  Jehovah.  But  this  is  the  covenant 
that  I  will  make  with  the  house  of  Israel:  After  these 
days,  saith  Jehovah,  I  will  put  my  law  in  their  inward 
parts,  and  in  their  heart  will  I  write  it;  and  I  will  be 
their  God,  and  they  shall  be  my  people.  And  they  shall 
teach  no  more  every  man  his  neighbour,  and  every  man 
his  brother,  saying,  Know  Jehovah:  for  they  all  shall 
know  me,  from  the  least  of  them  unto  the  greatest  of 
them,  saith  Jehovah :  for  I  will  forgive  their  iniquity  and 
their  sin  will  I  remember  no  more"  (Jer.  xxxi.  31  ff.). 

Beautiful  words!  no  wonder  the  early  Christians  laid 
hold  of  them  and  quoted  them  so  often !  And  the  infer- 
ence of  personal  immortality  seems  to  lie  so  near,  and 
he  did  not  draw  it!  One  thing,  however,  was  assured. 
When  the  day  came  that  Jews  would  draw  the  inference, 


THE  HEBREW  PROPHETS  153 

there  were  certain  fixed  points.  The  personality  of  God 
and  the  personality  of  man  were  established,  and  their 
inter-relation  made  it  clear  that  the  inference  would  not 
take  the  form  of  transmigration  of  souls.  Mankind  was 
to  have  an  alternative  to  the  cycle  of  eternal  re-dying,  the 
"sorrowful  weary  wheel." 

Let  us  sum  up  what  the  prophets  did.  A  religion  is 
always  conditioned  by  the  character  it  gives  to  God.  The 
Hebrew  prophets  kept  the  personality  of  God — kept  it 
triumphantly,  and  abolished  all  other  claimants  to  God- 
head. God  is  personal,  and  God  is  one;  God  is  righteous, 
and  God  is  kind — they  are  four  great  tenets  on  which  to 
base  any  religion,  and  they  were  not  lightly  won.  They 
were  the  outcome  of  experience,  hard,  bitter  and  disillus- 
ioning— a  gain  acquired  by  the  loss  of  all  kinds  of  hopes 
and  beliefs,  national  and  personal,  tested  in  every  way 
that  man  or  devil  can  invent  for  the  testing  of  belief. 
The  prophets  got  the  religion  of  Jehovah  detached,  or 
detachable,  from  shrine  and  cult,  just  when  the  deporta- 
tion and  the  exile  in  Babylon  made  it  imperative  that  the 
religion  must  do  without  shrine  and  cult  or  perish  for 
ever.  They  cut  it  clear  from  priesthood  and  tradition 
and  law-book,  though  their  successors  entangled  it  with 
these  again.  They  struck  the  blow  of  which  idolatry 
died.  They  made  righteousness  a  thing  no  more  of  ritual 
and  taboo  but  of  attitude  and  conduct  and  spirit.  They 
set  religion  free  from  ancient  follies  and  reviving  hor- 
rors. "Wherewith,"  says  Micah  (about  720  B.C.),  "shall 
I  come  before  Jehovah,  and  bow  myself  before  the  high 
God?  Shall  I  come  before  him  with  burnt  offerings, 
with  calves  of  a  year  old  ?  Will  Jehovah  be  pleased  with 
thousands  of  rams,  or  with  ten  thousands  of  rivers  of 
oil?  Shall  I  give  my  first-born  for  my  transgression, 
the  fruit  of  my  body  for  the  sin  of  my  soul?  He  hath 


154  PROGRESS  IN  RELIGION 

showed  thee,  O  man,  what  is  good;  and  what  doth  Je- 
hovah require  of  thee,  but  to  do  justly,  and  to  love  mercy, 
and  to  walk  humbly  with  thy  God  ?  28 

So  wrote  Micah — in  impressive  contrast  with  old  He- 
brew religion,  with  Greek  religion  and  with  what  we 
find  in  the  Roman  Empire  and  in  modern  India.  But 
there  was  another  chapter  of  religion  yet  to  write,  and 
Hosea  and  Jeremiah  saw  what  it  would  be  about.  They 
did  not  read,  nor  yet  divine,  all  its  contents;  but  they 
knew  that  it  would  turn,  not  on  what  Jehovah  requires 
of  man,  but  on  what  Jehovah  will  do  for  man,  how  He 
feels  for  him  and  what  He  will  give  him.  For  the  days 
were  coming  when  the  Hebrew,  like  the  Greek,  would  ask 
a  great  deal  of  his  God — Immortality,  for  a  beginning, 
and  other  things  more  wonderful. 

28  Micah  vL  6-8, 


VII 
THE  GREAT  CENTURY  OF  GREECE 

No  period  of  ancient  history  has  been  more  studied  than 
the  fifth  century  B.C.,  the  great  age  of  Athens;  and  yet 
one  of  the  acutest  thinkers  in  the  classical  field  to-day 
tells  us  that  "the  beliefs  of  sixth  and  fifth  century  Greece 
are  not  yet  fully  ascertained.  The  country  is  but  partially 
mapped  out,  and  any  one  who  sets  foot  in  it  risks  losing 
his  way."  He  points  out  that  to-day  so  many  forms  of 
religion  beside  the  Olympian  have  to  be  considered — 
"Orphic  mysteries  with  a  highly  spiritual  teaching,  Dio- 
nysiac  religion  emotional  and  enthusiastic,  and  the  propi- 
tiation of  formidable  Chthonian  deities."  *  We  are  told 
elsewhere,  with  at  least  enough  emphasis,  that  it  is  the 
three  last  forms  of  religion  which  are  important;  but 
Mr.  Livingstone  points  out  that  the  Olympian  gods  re- 
tained significance  enough  to  draw  upon  themselves  the 
successive  attacks  of  Euripides  and  Plato,  of  the  early 
Church,  of  Lucian  of  Samosata,  and  finally  of  St.  Augus- 
tine, while  Orphic  and  Chthonian  worship  escaped,  in 
the  main  or  altogether,  the  attention  of  reformer  and 
satirist — an  indication  surely  where  the  real  strength  lay. 
If  the  contention  which  we  have  been  studying  so  far  is 
valid — that  some  instinct  or  impulse,  something  natural 
within  him  and  inevitable,  drives  man  to  personalise  his 
god,  we  shall  not  be  altogether  surprised  at  this  conclu- 
sion. However  vague  the  religions  of  Dionysus  and 
Demeter  may  have  been  at  the  beginning,  and  for  long 
after  the  beginning  (whatever  and  whenever  that  was), 
whether  they  are  at  first  mere  responses  of  fear  and  hope 

1  The  Greek  Genius  and  its  Meaning  for  Us,  p.  49. 

100 


156  PROGRESS  IN  RELIGION 

to  observed  facts  of  alterations  of  personality  and  the 
fruitfulness  of  the  soil,  both  Dionysus  and  Demeter  de- 
veloped legends,  and  the  very  slightest  touch  served  to 
link  them  to  the  hierarchy  of  Olympian  gods.  It  may 
be  that  the  superficial  psychology  of  the  common  man, 
and  his  undeveloped  wonder  at  natural  processes,  served 
to  keep  a  basis  of  experience  under  these  two  divinities, 
which  some  gods  lost  early  if  they  ever  had  it;  none  the 
less  they  too  were  Olympian  and  personal.  The  Chtho- 
nian  powers  may  well  have  kept  their  significance  for 
people  who  were  tender  or  timid  rather  than  reflective, 
just  as  water-spirits  and  (more  vigorously)  ghosts  re- 
tain for  long  their  hold  on  some  types  of  mind,  and  luck 
and  one's  star  keep  it  still  longer.  But  they  cannot  be 
called  very  relevant  to  our  immediate  subject  of  Progress 
in  Religion,  unless  obstacles  are  to  be  reckoned. 

But  no  one,  I  think,  who  seriously  studies  ancient  his- 
tory, will  contend  that  the  real  importance,  the  real  value, 
of  that  fifth  century  B.C.  is  to  be  looked  for  in  the  wor- 
ship of  Chthonian  gods.  Matthew  Arnold  used  to  dis- 
tinguish between  the  permanent  and  the  historical  value 
of  literature;  certain  books  were  of  moment  to  those 
who  studied  the  period  in  which  they  were  produced,  but 
they  had  ceased  to  be  living  literature  in  any  sense.2  The 
student  of  the  fifth  century  must  indeed  recognise  that 
the  Chthonian  cults  continued  then,  and  no  doubt  for  long 
after;  superstitions  die  hard.  Yes,  they  die  hard,  but 
there  are  things  of  more  interest.  There  is  an  interest 
in  the  beast-lore  of  Elizabethan  days — 

Spring-headed  Hydraes,  and  sea-shouldring  Whales, 
Great  whirlpools  which  all  fishes  make  to  flee, 
Bright  Scoolpendraes,  arm'd  with  silver  scales, 
Mighty  Monoceroses  with  immeasured  tayles — 

2  Essays  in  Criticism,  ii.  No.  i.,  pp.  6ff.:  "the  fallacy  caused  by  the  esti- 
mate which  we  call  historic." 


THE  GREAT  CENTURY  OF  GREECE   157 

but  the  study  of  Nature  is  more  interesting.  My  analogy 
is  not  quite  perfect;  but  my  meaning,  as  I  have  tried  to 
say  already,  is  that  what  matters  at  any  stage  is  the  move- 
ment, or  impulse,  or  idea  that  makes  for  the  next  stage. 
In  the  fifth  century  no  one  would  claim  that  for  Chtho- 
nian  gods.  Wherever  and  whenever  they  are  in  the  as- 
cendent, one  may  look  for  retrograde  thinking  and  de- 
cline. 

It  was  the  age  when  Greece  became  more  conspicuously 
and  gloriously  Greece  than  ever  before,  when  all  the  pow- 
ers of  the  human  mind  flowered  at  once  and  then  bore 
fruit  as  they  never  had  done  in  a  period  of  the  same 
length  nor  perhaps  did  again  till  the  early  years  of  the 
sixteenth  century  A.D.  ;  and  on  that  fruit  mankind  has 
lived  with  a  satisfaction  always  intense,  and  its  seed  has 
in  turn  been  fruitful  in  every  civilised  race.  Our  busi- 
ness now  is  to  see  what  that  age  had  to  say  for  itself  in 
religion — not  what  it  inherited  and  kept  through  filial 
affection,  timidity,  or  mere  inattention,  but  what  it 
thought  out  on  its  own  account  and  found  interesting  to 
itself. 

Many  things  went  to  make  the  fifth  century  alert. 
There  is  a  sense  of  power  pervading  all  its  men — a  power 
stimulated  and  made  conscious  by  the  subjection  of  the 
world  to  man,  by  exploration  and  geographical  discovery, 
by  trade  and  adventure  outside  the  range  of  old  knowl- 
edge. But  exploration  took  place  in  other  regions  than 
the  Mediterranean;  "the  rise  of  mathematics  in  the  Py- 
thagorean school,"  we  are  told  in  a  suggestive  sentence, 
"had  revealed  for  the  first  time  the  power  of  thought,"  8 
and  mathematics  were  not  the  sole  revelation  of  this. 
Travel  had  brought  Greeks  into  contact  with  men  of 
many  minds  and  had  raised  many  questions,  difficult  and 
new ;  it  had  brought  them  face  to  face  with  customs  not 

«J.  Burnet,  Greek  Philosophy,  i.  p.  67. 


158  PROGRESS  IN  RELIGION 

their  own,  with  fauna  and  flora,  rivers,  mountains  and 
lands  full  of  wonder,  and  all  to  be  explained.  Criticism 
was  born.  The  impulse  to  understand,  the  impulse  to 
co-ordinate,  were  immensely  quickened;  and  the  habit 
grew,  which  marks  all  Greek  philosophy  at  last,  of  taking 
one's  stand  as  "the  spectator  of  all  time  and  all  exist- 
ence." *  The  phrase  is  Plato's,  and  the  thought  is  de- 
veloped by  Longinus  when  he  speaks  of  Plato — "for  the 
contemplation  and  thought  within  the  reach  of  man's 
mind  not  even  the  whole  universe  together  suffices;  but 
our  conceptions  often  pass  the  bounds  of  space;  if  one 
were  to  look  around  upon  life  on  every  side,  and  see  how 
in  all  things  the  striking,  the  great  and  the  beautiful 
stand  supreme,  he  will  soon  know  for  what  we  were 
born."  8  Longinus  lived  long  after  our  period,  but  he 
interprets  it  aright.  The  range  of  the  human  mind  was 
immensely  increased,  and  the  freedom  with  which  it 
treated  the  hugest  of  conceptions  and  the  subtlest  of 
laws. 

To  this  sense  of  power  and  to  the  widening  of  range 
we  have  to  add  an  intellectual  discipline  far  severer  than 
any  other  race  had  ever  known.  Greek  science,  geometry, 
astronomy — and,  I  expect,  medicine — went  beyond  the 
science  of  Egypt  and  Babylon,  whatever  they  gave  of 
stimulus.  The  mathematics  meant  discipline  of  thought, 
and  they  were  accompanied  by  logic  and  dialectic,  by 
criticism  that  became  more  and  more  acute  and  penetrat- 
ing— in  all,  a  training  that  makes  every  other  race  of 
mankind  seem  rather  provincial. 

Criticism  and  art  do  not  often  go  together,  but  in  this 
age  of  Greece  they  did.  Whatever  we  make  of  the  naive 
notion  of  more  commonplace  Greeks  that  poets  are  pre- 
eminently teachers — Homer  of  tactics,  Hesiod  of  farm- 

4  Plato,  Republic,  vi.  486  A. 
6  Longinus,  xxxv. 


THE  GREAT  CENTURY  OF  GREECE   159 

ing,  and  so  forth — the  three  great  tragic  poets  of  Athens 
were  teachers  indeed,  and  they  taught  things  far  beyond 
the  practical.  They  put  before  the  Athenians,  and  grad- 
ually before  all  Greeks,  problems  in  human  destiny,  in 
character  and  conduct,  and  in  such  a  way  that  the  spec- 
tators must  ponder  them  out  even  unconsciously.  The 
fall  of  Agamemnon,  the  tragic  results  of  Deianira's  in- 
directness,6 the  moral  grandeur  and  pitiful  fortune  of 
Hecuba  in  the  Trojan  Women,  will  occur  to  us  at  once. 
If  tragedy  declined  into  mere  pathos  and  quibbling,  as 
we  are  told,  argument  and  fierce  argument  was  at  its 
heart  from  the  first.  "God's  law  or  man's?"  asks  Anti- 
gone. "God's  justice  or  man's  interest?"  asks  Hecuba. 

If  gods  do  deeds  of  shame,  the  less  gods  they! 

cries  a  character  of  Euripides;  and  gods,  so  myth  and 
legend  and  religion  announced,  had  done  many  deeds  of 
shame,  and  men  began  to  feel  it.  There  is  argument 
there ;  but  more  potent  was  that  appeal  to  moral  instinct 
(Aides')  which  tragedy  made;  for  by  appealing  to  it 
tragedy  developed  moral  instinct,  and  when  once  that 
awakens,  there  is  nothing  so  educative.  Men  said  the 
gods  must  be  right,  they  felt  the  gods  were  wrong,  and 
it  was  vain  to  urge  that  laws  are  made  for  the  little  and 
do  not  apply  to  the  big.  The  gods  had  been  human  since 
Homer's  day,  and  now  men  were  coming  to  feel  what 
that  "human"  meant.  If  pity  and  terror  were  purged 
by  tragedy,  once  purified  they  reacted  on  men's  religious 
belief — an  awakened  pity  and  an  educated  terror  rose 
up  with  more  sympathy  for  human  pain  and  a  grip  on 
moral  principle  that  robbed  religious  darkness  of  many 
of  its  vague  alarms. 

But  it  was  not  only  by  starting  intellectual  problems 

e  Sophocles'  Trachiniae  seems  to  me  to  turn,  like  his  Philoctetes,  on  the  tragic 
failure  of  indirect  ways. 


160  PROGRESS  IN  RELIGION 

and  moral  problems  that  tragedy  influenced  Greek 
thought.  Side  by  side  with  sculpture,  it  brought  a  new 
aesthetic  sense  to  bear  on  all  life.  The  influence  of  a 
feeling  for  beauty  upon  religions  is  extraordinarily  sub- 
tle; it  is  very  hard,  or  impossible,  to  limit  its  scope;  it 
hurts  and  it  heals  and  it  transforms.  The  new  Dissent- 
ing chapel  that  replaces  the  barn  has  curious  effects  upon 
ceremony,  and  ceremony  upon  thought;  and  when  you 
reach  Westminster  Abbey  you  have  travelled  still  further 
from  the  upper  room  in  Ephesus  where  Paul  talked  half 
the  night.  The  sharp  edges  of  thought  that  squared  with 
the  barn  seem  out  of  place,  and  they  are  apt  to  go ;  and 
it  is  often  an  open  question  whether  they  ought  to  go. 
Right  and  wrong,  heaven  and  hell,  seem  in  sharper  an- 
tithesis at  the  street  corner  than  in  the  cathedral;  and  I 
think  both  Plato  and  Paul  would  say  that  they  cannot  be 
in  antithesis  too  sharp.  Why  does  art  make  us  want  to 
soften  contrasts  which  philosophy  counts  vital?  There 
we  touch  again  "that  ancient  quarrel  between  Poetry  and 
Philosophy"  that  troubled  Plato.7  If  Art  toned  down 
old  story,  if  it  softened  ancient  prejudice,  it  made  some- 
thing immortal — but  was  the  something  true?  Plato 
asked;  and  if  it  is  not  true,  does  Art  help  us?  These 
are  great  questions,  and  that  age  raised  them,  perhaps 
for  the  first  time;  and  as  my  illustration  from  English 
religion  suggests,  we  have  not  quite  solved  them  yet.  But 
Art  with  all  her  magic  was  there,  transforming  gods  and 
legends  and  fixing  their  form  for  ever — the  friend  and 
enemy  of  Religion  in  that  exasperating  and  alluring  way 
which  troubles  and  charms  us  still.  We  cannot  compute 
her  influence;  but  we  must  not  forget  it.  One  thing  we 
must  note — that  Art  brought  god  and  man  so  near  to- 
gether, gave  to  the  god  such  human  lineaments,  whis- 
pered to  man  such  hints  of  his  own  god-likeness,  that 

7  Plato,  Republic,  x.  607  B. 


THE  GREAT  CENTURY  OF  GREECE   161 

either  Religion  must  be  the  most  natural  and  at  last  most 
tender  of  all  necessary  modes  of  life,  or  it  must  be  the 
most  false  and  deadly  of  all  drugs  that  bewitch  the  soul 
and  lay  waste  the  nature.  Art  drew  men  very  close  to 
the  gods,8  or  with  its  "lies"  and  symbols  it  abolished  God. 
Art  stereotyped  God,  and  that  is  the  beginning  of  falsity ; 
"there  is  no  heresy  but  finality."  9 

So  much  for  the  effect  of  Art  on  one  side  of  Religion; 
and  I  have  only  suggested  a  few  of  the  questions  and 
answered  none  of  them.  Art,  however,  is  one  of  the 
most  individualising  of  all  man's  gifts.  If  Art  trans- 
forms Athene  in  the  Parthenon,  and  gives  her  beauty 
and  form  for  ever,  what  is  its  effect  on  the  artist  himself 
and  on  those  who  enter  in  any  degree  into  his  thought? 
He  and  they  gain  a  new  self-consciousness — partly  power 
and  partly  claim.  The  journeyman  may  be  put  on  one 
side;  the  real  artist  is  the  most  individual  of  men  in  his 
sense  of  power,  more  still  perhaps  in  his  feeling  that  he 
must  have  the  meaning  of  things,  not  an  abstract  general 
meaning,  but  what  they  definitely  intend  to  convey  to 
him.  His  mind — intellect,  imagination,  emotion,  every- 
thing included — is  the  last  great  court  of  appeal.  God 
or  gods,  ethics,  nature,  society,  wait  his  interpretation; 
and  as  he  interprets,  they  will  be.  Even  those  who  are 
not  great  artists,  who  lack  the  force  of  mind  and  the 
moral  qualities  of  the  greatest,  have  the  obvious  gift  of 
the  artistic  temperament.  That  it  was  not  at  all  unknown 
in  Greece,  we  are  reminded  by  Plato's  brilliant  and  amus- 
ing sketch  in  his  Ion ;  the  rhapsode  there  describes  himself 
unmistakably  as  an  artistic  temperament,  and  has  that 
strong  sense  of  the  supremely  significant  Ego  which  we 
know  so  well  in  the  type.  Those  who  dabbled  in  Art, 

8  Cf.  Dio   Chrysostom,   Or.  xii.    S3-     Pheidias*   Zeus  abolishes  men's  earlier 
conceptions  of  the  god;  Quint  jlian.  xii.  10,  8:  The  beauty  of  his  Zeus  adjecisse 
aliquid  etiam  receptce  reRgioni  viactur;  Livy,  xlv.  28:    Aemilius  Paullus,  at  the 
sight  of  the  statue,  lovem  velut  pratsentem  intuens  tnotus  animo  est. 

9  G.  Steven,  Psychology  of  Christian  Soul. 


162  PROGRESS  IN  RELIGION 

Sculpture  or  Poetry,  and  those  who  went  deeper  and  un- 
derstood the  problems  and  the  endeavours,  came  out,  in 
higher  degree  or  in  lower,  more  individual  than  they 
went  into  it. 

If  there  were  those  in  whom  Art  failed  to  waken  and 
to  stimulate  the  Ego,  the  Sophists  were  there  to  take  them 
a  nearer  way  to  the  meaning  of  the  individual.  They 
did  not  in  the  long  run  bear  a  good  name,  but  they  con- 
tributed to  the  growth  of  the  Greek  mind,  and  inciden- 
tally, but  inevitably,  to  the  remoulding  of  Greek  religion 
— a  genuine  contribution,  and  value,  even  if  we  discount 
their  services  for  their  excessive  rationalism.  But  that 
danger  is  one  that  besets  the  young  and  the  shallow,  and 
Society  is  saved  by  the  one  growing  in  experience  and 
by  the  other  sinking  into  nonentity;  and  the  great  gains 
remain,  of  the  emphasised  Individual  and  of  emphasised 
Reason. 

Finally,  on  this  part  of  our  subject,  there  was  the 
greatest  Sophist  of  all,  the  Athenian  public  itself;  and 
here  we  must  not  ignore  the  converse  of  Plato's  condem- 
nation.10 7ToA.zS  avdpa  didexffxsi,  said  Simonides  long 
before,  "the  city  teaches  the  man";  and  Athens  taught  her 
sons  to  be  themselves — "democratic  men,"  if  one  likes 
to  borrow  Plato's  dreadful  picture,  but  something  better, 
too.  Who  were  the  men  she  honoured  ?  Not  only  those 
who  echoed  her  ideas,  but  an  Aeschylus,  a  Sophocles,  a 
Pericles,  a  Protagoras — any  one  who  would  think  some- 
thing, or  do  something,  or  be  something,  distinctive.  El 
6e  rvxy  ri?  epSoov^ — "if  one  accomplish  aught  of 
doing" — that  was  it !  Athens  loved  and  honoured  it,  and 
invited  her  sons  to  be.  The  great  funeral  speech  of  Per- 
icles, whether  he  spoke  it  or  Thucydides  wrote  it,  is  a 
paean  upon  individuality. 

10  Plato,  Republic,  vi.  492  A. 
H  Pindar,  Nemeans  vii.  ix. 


THE  GREAT  CENTURY  OF  GREECE   163 

Let  us  sum  up  what  we  find,  then — an  age  full  of 
the  sense  of  power,  interested  in  ideas,  full  of  contrast 
and  contest,  absorbed  in  "the  spectacle  of  all  time  and  all 
existence,"  and  keen  in  its  interest  in  every  man  who 
was  individual.  Such  an  age  cannot  keep  altogether  off 
the  question  of  Religion,  and  it  will  have  something  to 
say  worth  hearing.  Its  alertness  and  its  experience  will 
give  it  a  right  to  speak — if  it  be  only  to  question — and  it 
will  say  more  than  was  ever  dreamed  or  mumbled  in  the 
rituals  of  Chthonian  gods. 

Herodotus  has  been  credited  with  a  simplicity  verging 
on  imbecility,  and  with  a  cynical  humour  to  vie  almost 
with  Gibbon;  quite  unjustly,  I  think,  in  both  cases.  He 
is  a  larger  nature  than  some  of  his  critics  realise,  and  his 
simplicity  is  that  of  genius.  He  is  open-eyed  and  open- 
minded  for  all  he  hears  about  the  gods,  and  he  weighs 
what  he  is  told.  He  does  not  approach  the  matter  with 
a  theory ;  let  that  be  our  first  point,  and  it  is  an  important 
one.  Around  him  are  men  who  worship  abjectly,  and 
men  who  blatantly  proclaim  their  lack  of  interest.  Hero- 
dotus avows  his  interest,  and  he  collects  and  notes  facts 
that  bear  on  the  question,  and  he  comments  on  what  he 
gathers.  He  notes  things  that  suggest  divine  interven- 
tion— miracles,  judgments,  alleged  theophanies,  and, 
above  all,  oracles.  But  he  does  not  commit  himself  to  all 
he  is  told ;  this  or  that  "they  said — which  another  may  be- 
lieve, but  not  I,"  he  says  sometimes;  and  again  he  em- 
phasises that  he  tells  what  he  has  been  told,  that  is  his 
function;  but  not  necessarily  to  believe  everything  men 
have  told  him  (vii.  152).  He  says  frankly  that  he  does 
not  say  anything  against  oracles,  that  he  does  not  allege 
them  to  be  anything  but  true  (viii.  77),  and  he  gives 
telling  instances  of  oracles  fulfilled;  but  he  recognises 
that  oracles  have  been  faked  or  counterfeited  (i.  66,  75 ; 
v.  91;  vii.  6).  He  feels  that  the  gods  did  intervene  in 


164  PROGRESS  IN  RELIGION 

the  Persian  war;  they  sent  the  storm  that  wrecked  the 
fleet  of  Xerxes  (viii.  13);  he  traces  Providence  in  the 
fecundity  of  certain  animals — design  in  nature  (iii.  108). 
He  has  a  sort  of  pious  reticence  in  speaking  of  Egyptian 
religion;  but  he  makes  shrewd  comments  on  the  evidence 
it  supplies  as  to  the  origin  of  Greek  gods,  cults  and 
theories.  He  believes  that  Greece  learnt  the  names  of 
her  gods  from  Egypt  after  worshipping  them  for  ages 
without  names  (ii.  50-57).  He  holds  that  the  Egyptians, 
first  of  all  men,  taught  the  immortality  of  the  soul  and 
its  transmigration — "certain  Greeks  have  used  that  doc- 
trine, some  of  old,  some  lately,  as  if  it  were  their  own. 
I  know  their  names;  but  I  do  not  write  them"  (ii.  123). 
Commentators  suggest  he  means  Empedocles,  though 
Pythagoras  is  the  name  of  which  one  thinks  first;  but 
he  does  not,  we  are  told,  speak  of  any  but  contemporaries 
in  this  way.  It  certainly  looks  as  if  he  sympathised  with 
the  Scythian  criticism  which  he  quotes  upon  Dionysus — 
that  "it  was  not  fitting  to  invent  a  god  like  this  who  im- 
pels men  to  frenzy"  (iv.  79).  He  was  interested,  too,  in 
Persian  religion — "Images  and  temples  and  altars  they 
do  not  account  it  lawful  to  erect,  nay,  they  even  charge 
with  folly  those  who  do  these  things;  and  this,  as  it 
seems  to  me,  because  they  do  not  account  the  gods  to  be 
in  the  likeness  of  men,  as  do  the  Hellenes.  But  it  is  their 
wont  to  perform  sacrifices  to  Zeus,  going  up  to  the  most 
lofty  of  the  mountains;  and  the  whole  circle  of  the 
heavens  they  call  Zeus";  and  so  forth  (i.  131).  This 
was  a  stage  in  the  history  of  Comparative  Religion,  which 
was  perhaps  the  child  of  Xenophanes.  Herodotus  is 
prepared  to  reconcile  Geology  and  Religion ;  men  said  the 
gorge  of  the  Peneios  was  made  by  Poseidon;  he  thought 
it  looked  like  the  work  of  an  earthquake;  well,  Poseidon 
is  the  author  of  earthquakes  (vii.  129).  Once  he  raises 
the  whole  problem  of  prayer.  While  the  storm  raged 


THE  GREAT  CENTURY  OF  GREECE   165 

against  the  Persian  fleet  at  Artemisium,  the  Magians  did 
sacrifice  and  chanted  and  "stopped  the  storm;  or  else  it 
flagged  and  dropped  of  its  own  accord"  (vii.  191).  On 
the  other  hand,  he  pulls  himself  up  once  at  the  end  of 
some  speculation — "now  that  I  have  said  so  much,  may 
the  gods  and  heroes  be  gracious!"  (ii.  45).  And  when 
the  Great  King  plans  his  expedition  against  Greece, 
Herodotus  tells  stories  to  show  that  the  king  was  forced 
into  it  by  divine  agency,  and  the  divine  bidding  was 
made  clear  to  him  in  dreams  (vii.  12-18). 

There  is  in  all  this  a  good  deal  of  wavering,  and  it 
answers  to  the  feeling  of  the  age.  It  was  a  question 
whether  the  gods  did  all  they  were  credited  with  doing; 
did  they  look  after  the  affairs  of  men,  intervene  in  them, 
guide  them?  did  they  give  oracles?  did  they  even  exist? 
Herodotus  is  interested  in  all  these  speculations;  he  is 
not  the  author  of  them,  but  they  all  wake  something 
within  him,  and  he  keeps  his  eyes  open,  as  I  said,  for 
evidence.  He  represents  the  age — eager  for  the  odd 
event,  the  striking  coincidence  (as  we  call  it,  not  without 
a  theory  of  our  own  perhaps) — curious  as  to  customs 
and  the  light  they  throw  on  origins — ready  to  speculate 
in  a  great  way,  as  Herodotus'  own  reflections  on  the 
Geology  of  Egypt  show — and  yet  not  desirous  to  break 
with  the  gods,  in  case  they  are  gods. 

In  spite  of  the  movement  of  Illumination,  which  we 
associate  with  it,  the  fifth  century  had  its  strong  under- 
currents of  piety  and  orthodoxy.  Cimon  brought  back 
the  bones  of  Theseus  from  Scyros  to  Athens,  and  that 
this  was  not  merely  like  the  return  of  the  dead  Napoleon 
from  St.  Helena  to  Paris,  is  shown  by  the  emphasis 
which  Sophocles  lays  on  the  advantage  to  be  derived  by 
Attica  from  the  dead  Oedipus.  "I  will  show  thee,"  says 
Oedipus  to  Theseus,  "the  way  to  the  place  where  I  must 
die.  But  that  place  reveal  thou  never  unto  mortal  man — 


166  PROGRESS  IN  RELIGION 

tell  not  where  it  is  hidden,  nor  in  what  region  it  lies; 
that  so  it  may  ever  make  for  thee  a  defence,  better  than 
many  shields,  better  than  the  succouring  spear  of  neigh- 
bours." " 

Foreign  gods  came  in  with  foreign  settlers — Adonis, 
Sabazios,  the  Mother  of  the  Gods,  and  so  forth;  but 
their  significance  for  our  present  purpose  lies  in  the  fact 
that  their  worship  was  in  Athens  a  matter  primarily  of 
private  judgment — a  point  noted  before  in  the  case  of 
the  mysteries.  Further,  the  Mother  of  the  Gods,  at  all 
events,  was  destined  to  have  a  long  and  a  great  history ; 
she  was  Olympianised  more  or  less,  but  she  remained  a 
possible  divinity  for  world-wide  worship — a  goddess  of 
universal  sway.  For  such  there  was  a  great  role  reserved, 
though  the  age  was  not  ripe  for  them,  in  spite  of  tenta- 
tive identification  of  Greek  gods  with  Egyptian.  They 
waited  for  Alexander. 

It  is  sometimes  said  that  Apollo  exercised  a  wide  in- 
fluence far  good  in  Greek  morals  and  politics.  I  am  not 
clear  what  the  evidence  is  for  this ;  but  in  our  period  the 
power  of  Apollo  was  materially  weakened  by  his  deser- 
tion to  the  Persians  in  the  great  invasion;  and  later  on 
the  definite  support  which  he  promised  Sparta  in  the 
Peloponnesian  war 13  must  have  made  it  still  further  clear 
how  little  basis  the  oracle  really  had  in  the  divine,  that 
it  was  an  affair  of  priests  who  had  their  price.  But  a 
rationalism,  political  or  religious,  that  cuts  men  off  from 
heaven,  is  little  joy.  We  even  find  Socrates  sending  Xen- 
ophon  to  consult  the  god  as  to  whether  he  should  go  to 
Cyrus.  And  Apollo  gave  oracles  down  to  Plutarch's 
day,  who  boldly  said  that  the  god  had  not  lost  his  glory 
of  three  thousand  years.  Men  wished  to  believe;  and  in 
times  of  fear  not  only  wish  but  panic  swept  them  back 
into  a  fierce  orthodoxy.  The  expulsion  of  Anaxagoras, 

12  Sophocles,  O.C.,  1520.  13  Thucydides,  i.   118. 


THE  GREAT  CENTURY  OF  GREECE   167 

the  prosecution  of  anybody  who  could  be  suspected  of 
the  mutilation  of  the  Hermai,  the  hemlock-cup  given  to 
Socrates,  remind  us  how  slowly  mankind  accepts  progress 
in  religion.  Yet  progress  there  was,  and  not  the  less 
genuine  for  being  largely  unconscious — "veiled  prog- 
ress," as  Professor  Lewis  Campbell  called  it. 

We  must  now  consider  more  specifically  certain  points 
that  have  occupied  us  already.  First  we  must  see  what 
the  men  of  this  time  have  to  say  of  the  gods;  next,  what 
are  their  thoughts  as  to  moral  law,  righteousness  and 
sin;  and  finally  what  hope  or  thought  they  had  of  im- 
mortality. In  every  direction  we  shall  find  great  de- 
velopment. 

Dr.  Adam  grouped  Pindar  and  Sophocles  as  the  most 
religious  of  Greek  poets — for  reasons  which  I  do  not 
quite  guess.  I  should  have  said  that  Euripides  had  more 
religion  in  him  than  the  pair  of  them.  Pindar,  however, 
stands  at  the  beginning  of  this  century  a  great  figure,  a 
master  of  sound  and  colour,  a  poet  who  alternately 
amazes  his  reader  with  his  wealth  and  with  his  poverty 
of  thought.  His  poetry  is  full,  as  we  all  know,  of  gods 
and  myths  and  legends.  He  is  pious,  aristocratic,  bril- 
liant, imaginative,  and  commonplace ;  and  what  he  finally 
believes  it  is  hard  to  divine — beyond  the  happiness  of 
good  fortune  and  good  birth  with  wealth,  the  wisdom  of 
prudence,  and,  of  course,  explicitly  and  fundamentally 
the  supreme  value  of  Poetry.  "God  is  in  heaven  and 
thou  upon  earth;  therefore  let  thy  words  be  few."  So 
the  Hebrew  thinker  said  (Eccles.  v.  2),  and  Pindar  might 
have  borrowed  his  phrase.  A  poet's  words  can  hardly 
be  few,  however,  and  we  do  not  ask  of  him  the  severity 
and  immediate  consistency  of  a  philosopher.  He  has 
many  thoughts  upon  the  gods;  and  of  most  of  them  we 
can  at  least  say  this — that  they  would  not  clash  with 
what  an  orthodox  patron  would  hold. 


168  PROGRESS  IN  RELIGION 

"God,"  says  Pindar — and  we  may  note  at  once  the 
large  general  term,  half  monotheistic  in  its  vagueness — 
"God  accomplisheth  every  end  whereon  he  thinketh,  God 
who  overtakes  the  eagle  on  the  wing,  and  passes  the 
dolphin  in  the  sea,  who  bendeth  the  high-minded  in  his 
pride,  and  to  others  he  giveth  deathless  glory"  (Pyth.  ii. 
50).  To  express  the  abstract  idea  of  omnipotence  he  uses 
pictures  of  power  and  speed  that  touch  the  imagination 
with  a  sense  of  the  wonder  of  God.  And  in  an  age  of 
change  and  chance  and  disorder,  that  omnipotence  is  in- 
scrutable. "Why  askest  thou  me?"  says  Cheiron  to 
Apollo.  "Thou,  who  knowest  the  certain  end  of  all 
things,  who  knowest  all  paths.  How  many  leaves  the 
earth  sendeth  forth  in  spring,  how  many  grains  of  sand 
in  sea  and  river  are  rolled  by  waves  and  the  winds'  stress, 
what  shall  come  to  pass,  and  whence  it  shall  be,  thou 
discernest  perfectly"  (Pyth.  ix.  44).  Apollo  "gave  heed 
to  his  own  wisdom,  his  mind  that  knoweth  all  things; 
in  lies  it  hath  no  part,  neither  in  act  or  thought  may  god 
or  man  deceive  him"  (Pyth.  iii.  29).  It  is  so  that  om- 
niscience is  brought  home  to  the  mind.  All  the  gods  are 
apt  with  Pindar  to  have  all  divine  quality,1*  yet  not  to 
be  exempt  from  impulses  and  passions  that  in  men  would 
be  called  lawless  and  animal.  It  is  interesting  to  see 
that  meanwhile  Pindar  tones  down  certain  of  the  ancient 
legends.  Men  said  that  a  god  ate  part  of  the  shoulder 
of  Pelops  at  the  table  of  Tantalos.  "Verily,"  says  Pin- 
dar, "many  things  are  wondrous,  and  haply  tales  decked 
out  with  cunning  fables  beyond  the  truth  make  false 
men's  speech  concerning  them.  .  .  .  Meet  is  it  for  a  man 
that  concerning  gods  he  speak  honourably;  for  the  re- 
proach is  less.  Of  these,  son  of  Tantalos,  I  will  speak 
contrariwise  to  them  who  have  gone  before  me.  .  .  .  To 

14  L.  Campbell,  Religion  in  Greek  Literature,  p.   171;   G.   F.   Moore,   History 
of  Religions,  p.  480. 


me  it  is  impossible  to  call  one  of  the  blessed  gods  canni- 
bal; I  keep  aloof;  in  telling  ill  tales  is  often  little  gain" 
(Ol.  i.  35  ff.).  But  tales  of  lawless  love  he  tells  many; 
tales  that  Euripides  set  in  their  true  light,  naked,  horrible 
and  cruel,  in  his  Ion;  Pindar  feels  no  shame  in  them.  He 
wrote  poems  in  honour  of  an  unspeakable  dedication  to 
Aphrodite  at  Corinth — Pindar,  who  will  tell  no  ill  tale 
of  God,  omnipotent,  omniscient.  "Forget  not  to  set 
God  above  everything  as  the  cause  thereof"  (Pyth.  v. 
23).  "Zeus  giveth  this  and  that  (good  and  evil)  ;  Zeus, 
lord  of  all"  (Isth.  v.  52).  It  is  a  strange  blending  of  old 
story  and  new  moral  sense,  of  destiny  over  all,  and  the 
gods  of  Homer  and  of  the  Semite.  Pindar  keeps  gods 
and  men  well  together — sons  of  Zeus  and  daughters  of 
men  produce  heroes;  man's  deeds  and  end  are  of  the 
gods'  giving  and  disposing.  "One  race  there  is  of  men 
and  one  of  gods,  but  from  one  mother  draw  we  both  our 
breath,  yet  is  the  strength  of  us  diverse  altogether,  for 
the  race  of  man  is  as  nought,  but  the  brazen  heaven  abid- 
eth,  a  habitation  steadfast  unto  everlasting.  Yet  withal 
have  we  somewhat  in  us  like  unto  the  immortal's  bodily 
shape  or  mighty  mind,  albeit  we  know  not  what  course 
hath  Destiny  marked  out  for  us  to  run."  15 

If  the  problems  of  God  and  destiny  from  time  to  time 
rise  before  the  mind  of  Pindar,  they  are  the  dominant 
preoccupation  of  Aeschylus.  Dr.  Adam  conceded  to 
Aeschylus  "a  greater  intensity  of  moral  purpose,  and  a 
far  profounder  treatment  of  moral  and  religious  prob- 
lems, than  either  the  subjects  of  Pindar's  odes  or  the 
peculiar  quality  of  his  genius  allowed." 16  How  this 
should  leave  Pindar  more  religious,  I  do  not  see.  Pro- 
fessor Lewis  Campbell,  indeed,  found  a  progress  in 
Aeschylus'  thought  on  these  matters,  as  might  well  be 

15  Pindar,  Nemean,  vi.   i;  cf.  Adam,  Vitality  of  Platonism,  p.   39. 

16  Adam,  Religious  Teachers  of  Greece,  p.  139. 


170  PROGRESS  IN  RELIGION 

with  a  man  who  gave  himself  so  intensely  to  the  greatest 
of  problems.  For  a  man's  mind  grows  with  the  tasks 
he  puts  upon  it  and  with  the  questions  to  which  he  conse- 
crates it.  In  the  Suppliants  the  legend  of  lo  transformed 
to  a  heifer  almost  jostles  the  conception  of  the  Almighti- 
ness  of  Zeus. 

That  ancient  saying  declared  aright 
"The  purpose  of  Zeus  there  is  none  may  trace." 

To  him  lieth  bare  in  his  own  fierce  light 

All — though  he  shroud  it  in  blackness  of  night 

From  the  prying  eyes  of  the  earth-born  race. 

The  thing  that  Zeus  by  his  nod  hath  decreed, 

Though  ye  wrestle  therewith,  it  shall  ne'er  be  o'erthrown; 
For,  through  tangled  ways  and  shadowy,  lead 
The  paths  of  the  purpose  that  none  may  impede, 
By  no  eye  to  be  scanned,  by  no  wisdom  known.17 

Suppl.  86-95. 

In  the  Prometheus  the  problem  is  one  of  reconciliation, 
though  the  end  is  lost  to  us,  as  we  have  only  one  play 
of  the  trilogy;  but  Fate  and  Zeus  and  Prometheus  have 
issues  to  settle,  which  can  only  be  settled  on  the  lines  of 
justice.  In  the  Persians,  with  a  deep  sense  of  the  Hel- 
lenic triumph  and  a  sense  still  deeper  that  divine  laws 
were  working  through  the  conflict,  the  poet  traces  an 
awful  vindication  of  moral  law  in  the  defeat  of  Xerxes — 
not  accident,  not  the  envy  of  the  gods,  but  Justice  de- 
termines all. 

Zeus  sits  on  high,  a  chastener  of  thoughts 
That  soar  above  man's  reach,  a  judge  austere. 

Pers.  827. 

The  great  sin  of  man  is  Hybris — "Jeshurun  waxed 
fat  and  kicked,"  is  the  contemptuous  phrase  of  the  He- 
brew poet,  and  the  very  word  comes  in  the  Agamemnon. 

17  A.  S.  Way,  altered  a  little. 


THE  GREAT  CENTURY  OF  GREECE   171 

"Struck  by  the  hand  of  Zeus!"  ay,  truth  indeed, 
And  traceable:  'tis  the  act  of  will  decreed 
And  purpose.    Under  foot  when  mortals  tread 
Fair  lovely  Sanctities,  the  Gods,  one  said, 
The  easy  Gods  are  careless:  'twas  profane! 
Here  are  sin's  wages  manifest  and  plain.  .  .  . 

The  Rich  man  hath  no  tower, 

Whose  Pride,  in  Surfeit's  hour, 

Kicks   against   high-enthroned   Right 

And  spurns  her  from  his  sight.        Agam.  37Q.18 

And  in  all  the  difficulties  and  perplexities  which  life 
flings  round  a  sentient  nature — the  fall  and  rise  of  for- 
tune, the  strife  of  good  and  evil — Aeschylus  divines  a 
law  of  God,  just  and  inevitable,  and  in  it  he  finds  comfort. 

Zeus  whosoe'er  he  be — 

In  that  name  so  it  please  him  hear — 
Zeus,  for  my  help  is  none  but  he; 
Conjecture  through  creation  free 

I  cast  but  cannot  find  his  peer; 
With  this  strange  load  upon  my  mind 
So  burdening,  only  Zeus  I  find 

To  lift  and  fling  it  sheer.  Agam.  I7O.18 

Justice  he  finds  in  God;  but  as  he  passes  out  of  the 
influence  of  old  legend  into  the  sphere  of  thought,  the 
turn  of  pious  phrase  "Zeus  whosoe'er  he  be"  more  than 
hints  that  it  is  a  law  rather  than  a  personality  that  rules. 
He  has  moved  beyond  Pindar;  for  he  has  felt  more 
deeply,  and  thought  more  intensely,  and  has  suffered; 
and  he  has  reached  a  promise  of  peace.  God,  in  what- 
ever sense  we  use  the  name,  is  righteous;  and  that  is  a 
discovery  that  bears  on  life  in  every  aspect,  that  will  take 
men  deep  into  new  secrets  of  God,  and  that  will  re-create 
at  last  the  whole  conception  of  God;  the  old  legends  will 
have  to  go,  and  man's  life  will  need  to  be  thought  out 

18  Walter  Headlam. 


172  PROGRESS  IN  RELIGION 

anew.  This  was  the  task  of  Euripides,  heir,  here  at  least, 
to  Aeschylus. 

But  in  the  meantime  there  were  other  thoughts  with 
which  men  had  to  reckon.  A  century  earlier  the  philos- 
ophers had  sought  a  primal  unity  into  which  to  resolve 
the  variety  of  the  world  and  of  all  being — water  or  fire, 
it  might  be,  or  the  vague  "unlimited."  These  thoughts 
were  not  dead;  they  had  gained  currency.  In  this  cen- 
tury Diogenes  of  Apollonia  was  pushing  Air  as  the  great 
original.  "Air,"  he  said,19  "as  it  is  called  by  men,  seems 
to  me  to  be  that  which  has  intelligence;  all  things  are 
steered  by  Air,  and  over  all  things  Air  has  power.  For 
this  very  thing  seems  to  me  God,  and  I  believe  that  it 
reaches  to  everything  and  disposes  everything  and  is 
present  in  everything.  .  .  .  The  soul  of  all  living  crea- 
tures is  the  same,  viz.  air  warmer  than  the  air  outside 
us  in  which  we  live,  but  much  colder  than  the  air  about 
the  sun."  Air  he  held  to  be  "great  and  strong  and 
eternal  and  knowing  many  things."  20  In  other  words, 
Diogenes  holds  a  kind  of  pantheism,  along  the  lines  of 
matter.  Adam  called  him  a  Stoic  born  out  of  due  time. 
His  contemporaries  might  have  asked  him,  as  Plutarch 
asked  the  Stoics,  what  became  of  God  and  righteousness 
on  his  terms ;  and  what  of  the  soul  ?  and  his  answer  must 
have  satisfied  them  as  little  as  the  Stoics  satisfied  Plu- 
tarch. God,  righteousness,  and  the  immortal  soul — all 
swept  into  matter  and  impersonality;  Religion  moves 
another  way.  The  solution  of  Diogenes  will  fail,  but  it 
remains  a  challenge  to  religion. 

Anaxagoras  was  the  first  Greek  to  try  to  distinguish 
mind  and  matter,21  and  that  he  impressed  his  times  we 
can  conclude  from  the  fact  that  the  wits  of  the  Athenian 

18  Adam,  Religious  Teachers  of  Greece,  p.  226;  Diels,  Vorsokratiker,  §51, 
fr.  5. 

20  Fr.  8. 

21  See  discussion  by  Adam,  Religious  Teachers  of  Greece,  p.   259,  and  the 
evidence  of  Plato,  Phaedo,  98  B. 


THE  GREAT  CENTURY  OF  GREECE   173 

streets  nicknamed  him  Nous,  and  that  the  orthodox  of 
the  anti-Pericleian  party  prosecuted  him  for  impiety.  But 
the  ground  of  the  prosecution  may  have  been  his  con- 
clusion, after  some  study  of  meteorites,  that  the  sun  was 
merely  a  large  mass  of  incandescent  stone.  Anaxagoras 
held  that  Mind,  which  "has  all  knowledge  about  every- 
thing," "has  power  over  all  things  that  have  life"  and 
"owns  no  master  but  itself,"  "set  in  order  all  things  that 
were  to  be"  and  started  that  rotatory  motion  which  made 
the  world.  Plato  represents  Socrates  as  complaining  that, 
while  Anaxagoras  started  well  with  his  conception  of 
Mind,  he  fell  back  too  soon  on  material  forces  and  causes. 
Philosophy,  says  Callicles  in  the  Gorgias,  is  a  good 
thing  up  to  a  certain  point;  but  you  can  go  too  far. 
There  were  people  in  the  fifth  century  who  wanted  to 
see  how  it  all  bore  on  the  gods  and  on  religion ;  they  felt 
that  religion  really  was  something;  everybody  had  said 
so;  now  what  did  all  this  philosophy  make  of  the  gods? 
Protagoras  bluntly  said  he  did  not  know ;  he  did  not  even 
know  whether  gods  exist  or  not ;  his  working  scheme  was 
a  hand-to-mouth  pragmatism — "other  people  think  dif- 
ferently," as  we  say  in  Cambridge;  and  there  the  thing 
rests.  Nobody  can  know,  but  then  everybody  can  think; 
and  what  you  think  is  true  for  you,  if  it  is  false  for  me. 
But  everybody  believes  in  gods  of  some  kind.  Prodicos 
explained  that  "primitive  man  deified  the  sun  and  moon, 
rivers  and  fountains,  in  a  word,  whatsoever  things  ben- 
efit our  life,  on  account  of  the  services  they  render,  just 
as  the  Egyptians  deify  the  Nile."  Here  was  Comparative 
Religion  again;  Egypt  once  more  gave  the  clue,  and  the 
physicists  were  still  in  the  ascendent.  Critias  went  fur- 
ther ; *2  the  gods  were  not,  as  Prodicos  suggested,  the 
creation  of  a  natural  instinct;  they  were  the  contrivance 

22  Verses  by  Critias,  quoted  by  Sextus  Empiricus,  adv.  Math.  ix.   54;  Diels, 
Vorsokratiker,  vol.  ii.  no.  81,  p.  620. 


174  PROGRESS  IN  RELIGION 

of  an  ingenious  man  who,  because  governments  could 
not  control  everything,  imposed  them  upon  the  vulgar  as 
an  invisible  secret  police,  remarkably  effective  in  main- 
taining decency — a  lie,  of  course,  but  a  very  good  one, 
with  truth  somewhere  or  other  in  it.  Three  centuries 
later  Polybius  is  found  with  much  the  same  idea 23 — and 
Polybius  is  a  much  less  flippant  figure  than  Critias.  It 
will  be  noted  for  what  it  is  worth,  that  this  view  associates 
the  gods  with  morality. 

If  any  of  these  views  be  right,  what  becomes  of  the 
gods?  Thucydides  was  not  a  typical  Athenian,  but  he 
shows  how  little  the  gods  were  conceived  by  ordinary 
Athenians  as  being  concerned  with  morality,  personal  or 
international.  Nicias  was  pious  enough,  and  ruined 
Athens  at  Syracuse.  The  repulsiveness  of  the  political 
immorality  avowed  by  Athenian  diplomats  at  Melos 
would  not,  the  Athenians  thought,  alienate  the  sympathy 
of  the  gods.  The  common  man,  then,  after  all  these 
ages  of  thought,  was  at  the  primitive  point  of  view — 
that  religion  and  morality  have  nothing  to  do  with  each 
other.  And,  one  is  tempted  to  add,  there  he  is  still, 
whenever  he  is  really  frightened. 

The  uncommon  man  took  a  different  view. 

If  gods  do  deeds  of  shame,  the  less  gods  they! 

So  said  Euripides.  He  found  "great  confusion  among 
things  divine,  yes,  and  mortal  things  too"  (I ph.  Taur. 
572).  Sometimes  he  seems  to  lean  toward  Diogenes 
of  Apollonia  and  his  identification  of  god  and  air : — 

Thee,  self-begotten,  who  in  aether  rolled 

Ceaselessly  round,  by  mystic  links  dost  bind 

The  nature  of  all  things,  whom  veils  enfold 

Of  light,  of  dark  night,  flecked  with  gleams  of  gold, 

Of  star-hosts  dancing  round  thee  without  end. 

Fr.  593- 

23  In  speaking  of  the  Romans  and  the  pains  of  hell,  vi.  6;  cf.  p.  294. 


THE  GREAT  CENTURY  OF  GREECE      175 

Pantheism  is  as  susceptible  of  splendid  language  as  the 
orthodoxy  of  Pindar,  but  to  come  to  the  brute  facts  of 
life,  and  they  were  many;  "O  Zeus!"  cries  Euripides, 

O  Zeus!  what  shall  I  say?  that  thou  seest  men? 
Or  that  they  hold  this  doctrine  all  in  vain, 
And  Chance  rules  everything  among  mankind? 

Hec.  488. 

With  relentless  hand  he  drew  gods  doing  deeds  of 
shame — not  new  ones,  but  the  old  deeds  of  shame  conse- 
crated in  legend — "these  be  thy  gods,  O  Athens."  It 
was  quite  clear  that  he  was  an  atheist,  as  Aristophanes 
said ;  and  he  did  well  to  go  to  Macedonia.  A  self-respect- 
ing nation  is  better  without  men  who  think  for  them- 
selves; they  only  make  trouble.  So  the  Peloponnesian  war 
taught  the  Athenians.  "Dulness  and  modesty  (dpaOia 
jj.sra  GGo<ppoffvvrjs)  are  a  more  useful  combination  than 
cleverness  and  license.  The  simple  sort  generally  make 
better  citizens  than  the  more  acute."  So  said  the  great 
Athenian  leader.2*  What  does  a  nation  engaged  in  a 
great  war  want  with  intellect?  So  Euripides  went  to 
Macedonia;  but  before  he  goes  let  us  hear  him  once  more 
on  God  and  Righteousness — before  the  hemlock  is  given 
to  Socrates  and  the  last  voice  of  all  of  this  century  is 
silenced. 

0  stay  of  earth,  who  hast  thy  seat  on  earth, 
Whoe'er  thou  art,  ill-guessed  and  hard  to  know, 
Zeus,  whether  Nature's  law,  or  mind  of  man, 

1  pray  to  thee;  for,  on  a  noiseless  path, 

All  mortal  things  by  justice  thou  dost  guide. 

Troades,  884. 

Here  are  echoes  of  Aeschylus,  and  of  Diogenes  of 
Apollonia,  perhaps — the  cry,  at  all  events,  of  a  heart, 
racked  with  every  question  the  mind  ever  framed,  crying 

24  Cleon,  in  Thucydides,  iii.  37,  38. 


176  PROGRESS  IN  RELIGION 

aloud  for  God  and  Righteousness — the  voice  of  one  cry- 
ing in  a  wilderness  of  problems  and  theories  and  dark- 
ness, alone,  individual. 

So  much  said  about  the  gods,  the  outlines  of  the  dis- 
cussion of  Righteousness,  divine  and  human,  are  laid 
down.  The  Greek  conception  of  the  state  implied  law; 
but  Greek  thinkers  had  no  term  which  quite  answered 
to  ours.  They  called  the  laws  of  the  state,  Nomoi;  but 
Nomoi  also  meant  customs — its  more  usual  meaning  at 
first.  Reflective  Greeks  saw  the  significance  of  this  like- 
ness of  law  and  custom ;  "Custom  rules  all,"  says  Pindar 
as  Herodotus  quotes  him  (vii.  104).  But  in  Nature,  as 
opposed  to  human  society,  they  saw  something  else.  "If 
the  sun  pass  bounds,  the  Erinnyes,  aiders  of  Justice,  will 
find  him,"  as  we  saw.  That  is  poetic  language;  in  plain 
prose,  Nature  manages  her  business  by  compulsion,  by 
necessity,  Ananke.  Between  Nomos  and  Ananke  there 
is  a  broad  gulf — between  Nature  and  usage.  Where  are 
we  to  place  what  Pericles  calls  "those  unwritten  laws,  the 
transgression  of  which  brings  admitted  shame"  ?  25  Where 
are  the  sanctions  and  basis  to  be  found  for  that  social 
morality  on  which  the  well-being  of  state  and  individual 
so  obviously  depends?  That  was  the  question.  Pindar 
called  Truth  "the  daughter  of  Zeus"  (01.  x.  2),  and 
Aeschylus,  as  we  have  seen,  found  the  closest  of  asso- 
ciations between  Zeus  "whoever  he  be"  and  Righteous- 
ness. Even  Euripides,  with  all  his  hesitations,  had  the 
same  feeling.  But  what  if  Protagoras  is  right,  if  Truth 
is  not  the  daughter  of  Zeus,  but  your  own  notion  of  the 
moment,  if  right  and  wrong  are  exactly  what  you  make 
them  ?  We  reach  the  conclusion  of  Callicles,  the  practical 
man  in  the  Gorgias — echoed  instinctively  by  many  other 
practical  people  in  many  lands  and  ages — that  "Right  is 
the  interest  of  the  strongest."  That  was  a  sturdy  Athen- 

26  Pericles,  in  Thucydides,  ii.  37. 


THE  GREAT  CENTURY  OF  GREECE   177 

ian  conviction  which  Plato  had  to  refute;  and  it  took 
some  refutation,  for  every  ancient  community  rested  on 
slavery;  and  what  justification  was  there,  or  is  there, 
for  any  slavery,  however  well  disguised,  but  just  this 
"interest  of  the  strongest"?  It  followed  that  Right  and 
Wrong  are  merely  charms,  mantrams,  with  which  the 
many  humbug  or  hypnotise  one  another — sheer  nothings 
with  no  foundation  in  Nature  or  anywhere  else.  Mean- 
while the  cults  continued  in  the  old  way,  with  the  old 
notions — conspicuously  Notnos  all  of  them,  mere  cus- 
tom, and  more  obviously  unreal,  as  men  entered  into  the 
philosophic  conceptions,  pantheism,  natural  law,  and  the 
relativity  of  all  morals.  The  priests  and  prophets  made 
money  out  of  it,  and  talked  about  sin  and  holiness;  but 
what  were  sin  and  holiness?  The  language  was  old  and 
unreal.  No  doubt  there  was  something  in  Sophocles' 
praise  of  the  "kindly  soul"  (O.C.  495);  but  then  Soph- 
ocles always  took  the  safe  way  and  steered  clear  of  the 
questions  that  racked  Aeschylus  and  Euripides.  "Hard 
it  is,"  said  Simonides  long  ago,  "to  be  good  in  truth, 
hands  and  feet  and  mind  foursquare,  wrought  without 
blame."  It  was  harder  than  ever  now.  And  yet,  in 
spite  of  questions,  or  because  of  them,  man's  instinct 
for  righteousness  was  growing.  It  was  this  that  nerved 
Euripides'  attack  on  the  current  opinions  of  the  gods,  as 
it  inspired  Plato's  a  generation  later.  Only,  a  reasoned 
and  understood  foundation  had  to  be  found. 

The  course  of  Greek  thought  is  very  different  from 
that  of  Hebrew — here,  as  in  the  matter  of  God's  per- 
sonality. The  Greek  never  developed  any  strong  sense 
of  sin,  as  he  never  succeeded  in  making  or  keeping  God 
both  personal  and  righteous  at  the  same  time. 

Finally,  on  Immortality,  what  could  be  said?  The 
cults  went  on  as  before,  with  their  talk  of  things  in 
Hades;  but  if  God  and  the  soul  are  air,  and  death  mingles 


178  PROGRESS  IN  RELIGION 

two  wafts  of  air,  where  is  the  man?  and  what  is  the  use 
of  initiation?  What  can  it  do?  The  "holy" — and  the 
meaning  of  that  word  was  as  essentially  the  creation  of 
Nomos  as  anything;  it  had  nothing  to  do  with  Nature, 
or  Righteousness,  or  anything  recognisable — the  "holy" 
were  on  one  side  and  the  reflective  on  the  other.  Pindar 
in  his  second  Olympian  drew  islands  of  the  blest,  round 
which  ocean  breezes  blow,  where  golden  flowers  are 
glowing,  where  the  good,  set  free  from  labour,  possess 
a  tearless  life,  with  the  honoured  of  the  gods,  whosoever 
had  pleasure  in  keeping  of  oaths,  whosoever  were  of  good 
courage  and  refrained  their  souls  from  all  iniquity.  Won- 
derful vision!  but,  says  Euripides  in  his  Hippolytus: 

But  if  any  far-off  state  there  be 
Dearer  than  life  to  mortality; 
The  hand  of  the  Dark  hath  hold  thereof 
And  mist  is  under  and  mist  above ; 
So  we  are  sick  for  life,  and  cling 
On  earth  to  this  nameless  and  shining  thing. 
For  other  life  is  a  fountain  sealed, 
And  the  deeps  below  us  are  unrevealed, 
And  we  drift  on  legends  for  ever." 

In  the  curiously  explicit  phrase  of  the  Greek  here,  Pin- 
dar's pictures  fail  "through  non-demonstration." 

Let  us  sum  up  what  Greece  has  reached  in  the  cen- 
turies so  far,  and  not  forget  the  Hebrews.  Greece  at 
least  has  discovered  the  individual,  and  made  him  the 
centre  of  all  religion.  With  all  that  men  tell  us  of  Greek 
conceptions  of  the  City  and  the  State,  it  is  remarkable 
that  the  religious  thinkers  of  Greece  had  so  little  to  say 
of  State  or  City;  they  offer  no  very  clear  account  of  the 
relation  of  the  ultimate  divine  to  anything  but  the  uni- 
verse and  the  individual.  When  the  world  broke  up 
under  the  successors  of  Alexander,  these  were  the  two 

26  Euripides,    Hippolytus,    191;    Gilbert    Murray's   translation. 


THE  GREAT  CENTURY  OF  GREECE   179 

fixed  points  with  the  Stoic.  All  Greek  history  and  litera- 
ture was  a  preparation  for  the  Stoic  emphasis  on  the  in- 
dividual. The  Stoic  indeed  coined  the  terms  for  "con- 
science" and  "will,"  and  much  else,  but  the  individual 
was  a  discovery  of  earlier  days. 

The  Greek  talked  much  of  God  and  gods ;  he  personal- 
ised his  Pantheon  and  left  it  behind.  He  did  not  listen 
to  God  as  the  Hebrew  prophets  did;  he  never  had  a 
"Thus  saith  the  Lord."  The  ultimate  divine  was  too 
impersonal  to  speak;  it  was  not  Lord;  it  was  hardly  in- 
terested in  any  man  or  in  any  thing.  But  Law  in  one 
form  or  another  the  Greek  discovered.  Law  or  Reason, 
or  both,  ruled  Nature.  Morality  was  written  in  Nature, 
and  the  Stoic  at  last  made  the  centre  of  his  teaching  the 
Law  of  Nature. 

Greek  religion  failed.  Religion  and  philosophy  parted 
company.  The  Greeks  looked  outside  themselves  for 
religion,  and  one  and  another  religion  they  found,  and 
intellectualised  them,  in  turn.  But  great  as  their  in- 
fluence has  been  they  left  the  centre  of  things  vague  and 
abstract,  and  the  heart  of  man  will  not  have  it  so. 

So  far  as  we  have  reached,  we  have  so  much.  Man 
has  an  inward  instinct,  a  drive  within  himself,  to  unify 
his  experience,  to  personalise  God,  to  ask  morality  of  his 
God  and  to  impose  it  upon  himself,  and  finally  to  demand 
of  God  the  recognition  of  his  personality  and  of  all  that 
it  implies.  Greek  and  Hebrew  move  toward  the  same 
goal,  propelled  by  the  same  impulses.  The  whole  world, 
as  Paul  said,  groans  together  in  travail.  The  cost  is 
great,  as  prophet  and  philosopher  found;  but  what  is 
once  gained  is  never  quite  lost  again.  Slow  and  fluctuat- 
ing, there  is  a  progress  in  man's  conceptions  of  God,  and 
mankind  moves  forward  with  a  surer  hope  of  reaching 
Truth. 


VIII 
PLATO 

THERE  is  a  certain  audacity,  not  unlike  the  violence  of 
those  who  take  the  Kingdom  of  Heaven  by  force,  an 
audacity  almost  shameless,  about  a  mere  historian  who 
will  endeavour  out  of  the  thoughts  and  the  impulses  of 
a  "myriad-minded  man"  like  Plato  to  make  a  single 
chapter  in  a  story  of  Progress  in  Religion.  Professed 
Platonists  will  count  it  irreverent;  they  will  find  the  treat- 
ment inadequate;  and  they  may  not  hold  it  a  sufficient 
apology  when  the  historian  pleads  guilty  to  their  charges. 
But  Plato  has  been  the  study  of  centuries,  men  have  given 
their  lives  to  him,  and  it  is  not  wanting  in  reverence  to 
use  their  results,  their  judgments  and  conclusions.  And 
there  are  other  lines  of  defence.  Plato  was  not  the 
writer  of  a  coterie;  he  took  pains  to  write  in  such  a  way 
as  to  charm  his  readers,  and,  when  he  has  captured  them, 
to  put  forward  certain  lines  of  thought  with  such  clear- 
ness and  power  that  his  readers  cannot  miss  them,  and 
with  such  life  that  he  starts  trains  of  reflection  in  their 
minds,  which  work  on  independently  of  books.  The 
Greek  world  lost  the  manuscripts  of  Heraclitus;  it  nearly 
lost  Aristotle's;  but  it  kept  Plato,  read  him,  submitted 
to  him,  and  transmuted  him  into  Greek  life,  and  thence 
into  much  else.  Like  St.  Paul,  Plato  was  a  mind  irre- 
ducible to  a  system,  too  progressive  through  eighty  years 
to  be  harmonised  with  itself  by  smaller  minds.  Indeed 
with  such  men  it  is  common  to  find  that  they  hardly  at- 
tempt this  task  themselves;  they  are  more  keen  to  dis- 
cover and  to  assimilate  truth,  reality,  nature,  than  to 

180 


PLATO  181 

reconcile  their  own  views  past  and  present.  The  en- 
deavour is  always  there  to  make  unity  of  all  they  find; 
the  conviction  remains  that  all  reality  is  in  unity  with 
itself;  but  they  outgrow  and  discard  their  own  thoughts 
and  move  onward.  It  is  this  habit  of  mind  that  above 
all  gives  them  their  influence  and  makes  it  wide-reaching. 
For,  like  St.  Augustine,  Plato  is  the  father  of  many 
schools;  the  mystics  of  antiquity,  of  the  Middle  Ages 
and  of  the  Renaissance,  found  their  stimulus  and  their 
exemplar  in  him,  while  he  gave  mankind  the  real  im- 
petus to  overcome  or  to  correct  mysticism  in  his  insistence 
on  the  rational  basis  and  inter-relation  of  all  that  is,  and 
on  its  intelligibility  to  the  human  mind. 

It  is  not  necessary  to  tell  at  length  the  story  of  his 
life  or  to  attempt  to  date  his  works;  but  certain  outstand- 
ing factors  may  be  noted  in  passing.  He  was  the  child 
of  the  great  period  of  Athens  and  of  Greece;  and  like 
other  children  of  genius  he  criticised  home  and  parents 
as  genius  only  can.  To  get  his  point  of  departure  we 
must  recall  the  grandeur  of  that  fifth  century — its  sense 
of  power  in  every  sphere  that  appeals  to  the  human  mind. 
The  Greek  had  conquered  sea  and  sky,  navigation,  as- 
tronomy, geography;  he  had  triumphed  over  the  for- 
eigner; he  had  tasted  empire.  He  drank  too  deep  of 
power,  and  his  sense  of  power  led  him  away  from  reality; 
and  the  reaction  against  Greek  and  Athenian  perversion 
of  power  and  truth  is  to  be  seen  in  Plato  as  well  as  in 
Euripides.  The  most  gifted  community  that  the  world 
had  seen  or  has  yet  seen  gave  the  hemlock-cup  to  Soc- 
rates— and  this  in  its  hour  of  sobriety  and  reformation, 
and  on  the  proposal,  not  of  the  wilder  demagogues,  but 
of  quite  respectable  citizens.  Democracy  had  failed  un- 
der the  test  of  the  Peloponnesian  war;  and  here  was  a 
worse  failure.  Again  and  again,  as  we  have  seen,  the 
forward  steps  in  religious  thought  are  taken  under  the 


182  PROGRESS  IN  RELIGION 

stress  of  social  breakdown,  of  human  failure  on  a  large 
scale.  Plato's  nature  was  not  so  easily  satisfied  as  that 
of  Anytos,  who  impeached  Socrates;  democracy,  human 
nature,  Greek  achievement  failed  to  content  him,  and  the 
old  problems  of  God  and  righteousness,  of  society  and 
the  soul,  rose  again. 

This  time  they  were  handled  by  a  man  of  genius  be- 
yond comparison  with  anything  that  Greece  had  seen. 
It  was  his  ideal  to  be  "spectator  of  all  time  and  all  exist- 
ence," x  to  understand,  and  to  base  himself  on  reason; 
and,  at  the  same  time,  in  him,  as  Dr.  Caird  says,  "the 
poet  generally  spoke  before  the  philosopher."  2  A  Puri- 
tan with  a  sense  of  humour,  with  an  intense  feeling  for 
beauty,  an  inexorable  reasoner,  a  man  of  friendships,  a 
human  being  sorely  tried  by  national  and  personal  suffer- 
ing and  humiliation,  and  a  man  of  genius  whose  very 
mistakes  are  more  fertile  than  another  man's  escapes 
from  error — he  could  leave  nothing  as  he  found  it.  He 
must  handle  "the  whole  tragedy  and  comedy  of  life,"  8 
and  what  he  made  of  it  must  change  the  thinking  of  man- 
kind. It  was  part  of  his  contribution  to  human  progress 
that  he  knew  when  he  had  not  completely  solved  a  prob- 
lem. His  myths  have  had  an  immense  influence ;  to  some 
they  were  revelation;  to  others  they  meant  rather  the 
holding  of  the  door  open,  the  suggestion  that  Reason 
would  at  last  discover  what  Intuition  divined.  Euripides 
refused,  or  tried  to  refuse,  Intuition;  Plato  used  it,  but 
he  was  as  clear  as  Euripides  that,  however  akin  to  Rea- 
son, it  is  not  Reason. 

So  far,  in  following  the  movements  of  religious 
thought,  we  have  remarked  from  the  first  a  progressively 
strong  tendency  to  emphasise  the  unity  of  experience,  the 

1  Republic,  vi.  486x  A. 

2  E.   Caird,  Evolution   of  Tlieology  in  the  Greek  Philosophers,   i.  p.  93. 

3  Philebus,  50  B. :     rjj  TOV  (Jlov  £vpird<rT]  rpaytfiiq,  Kal 


PLATO  183 

unity  of  the  universe,  to  bring,  in  Plato's  own  phrase 
already  quoted,  all  time  and  all  existence  under  one  sur- 
vey. That  assumed,  men  go  on  to  attribute  personality 
and  at  last  unity  to  the  god-head;  they  bring  God  and 
man  and  the  universe  under  one  law  of  righteousness, 
and  they  make  more  and  more  of  man's  personality  till 
finally  they  demand  for  him  a  full  and  real  immortality. 
When  one  reflects  upon  these  things,  one  is  half  tempted 
to  think  them  taken  directly  from  Plato  himself,  so  large 
a  place  do  they  occupy  in  his  thought. 

In  one  memorable  phrase  after  another  Plato  brings 
out  that  the  unity  of  all  things  is  no  accidental  quality, 
no  mere  fact,  but  the  essence  of  their  being.  The  doc- 
trine of  ideas,  of  the  spiritual  counterpart,  of  "the  pat- 
tern in  the  heavens,"  brings  the  phenomenal  into  closer 
relation  with  the  real  world  than  was  ever  achieved  be- 
fore. When  he  relates  all  ideas  to  the  idea  of  good,  he 
carries  this  essential  unity  of  all  things  further  still.  Man, 
he  says,  is  "a  heavenly  plant,  not  of  the  earth";  4  he  too 
belongs  to  the  realm  of  the  unseen  and  the  eternal. 
"God,"  says  Plato,  "made  soul  prior  to  body  and  older 
than  it."  5  World-soul  and  man's  soul  are  all  of  God. 
"When  he  framed  the  Universe,  he  set  Reason  in  soul 
and  soul  in  body,  in  order  that  he  might  be  the  author 
of  a  work  that  in  its  nature  should  be  as  beautiful  and 
good  as  possible."  6  That  is  how  he  looks  at  all  time 
and  all  existence,  and  the  conception  of  the  unity  of  all 
things  glows  with  warmth  and  colour  in  a  new  way. 

A  man's  religious  outlook,  and  not  necessarily  less  if 
he  be  a  great  man,  is  affected  by  the  current  religious 
ideas  of  his  day,  whether  he  sympathise  with  them  or  be 
repelled  by  them.  We  have  seen  already  something  of 
the  various  attitudes  of  ordinary  men  and  philosophers 

4  Timaeus,  90  A. 
6  Timaeus,  34  C. 
6  Timaeus,  30. 


184.  PROGRESS  IN  RELIGION 

toward  the  gods.  Socrates  was  given  the  hemlock  be- 
cause he  did  not  satisfy  an  Athenian  court  that  his  teach- 
ing about  the  gods  was  correct.  They  knew  that  many 
of  the  philosophic  teachers,  if  not  downright  atheists, 
were  what  we  now  call  agnostic — that  was  avowedly  the 
position  of  Protagoras;  they  suspected  that  Socrates  had 
gods  of  his  own,  not  those  of  their  city;  and  they  had 
evidence  of  the  most  dreadful  and  unmistakable  kind 
that  his  pupils  were  enemies  of  god  and  man,  were  men 
of  corrupted  mind  and  nature,  whoever  had  corrupted 
them.  The  Athenians  were  steadily  loyal  to  a  traditional 
piety  which  bore  no  relation,  apparently,  to  astronomical 
or  other  scientific  discovery,  and  still  less  to  any  morality 
of  a  progressive  kind.  Homer  was  still  learnt  by  heart.7 
and  many  people  were  in  their  religious  thinking  still  at 
a  pre-Homeric  point  of  view.  The  mysteries  still  gave 
men  and  women  what  they  supposed  to  be  revelations 
of  the  gods,  and  by  exciting  certain  feelings  inspired  them 
to  believe  that  their  immortal  happiness  was  assured. 
Orphic  priests  and  others  of  their  kind  held  more  private 
initiations  and  offered  reconciliation  with  the  gods  on 
lines  independent  of  the  intellect  and  of  morality,  and 
on  terms  tainted  with  the  sordid  suggestion  of  money 
profit.  Not  all  Athenian  religion  was  of  this  rather  prim- 
itive and  emotional  type.  For  when  Xenophon  represents 
Socrates  as  believing  in  constant  and  reliable  relations 
between  gods  and  men,  and  as  holding  "that  the  gods 
know  all  things,  what  is  said,  what  is  done,  what  is 
planned  in  silence,  they  are  everywhere  present  and  give 
signs  to  men  about  all  the  affairs  of  men,"  8  as  recom- 
mending Hesiod's  famous  line: 

Give   all  thou  canst  in  sacrifice  to  heaven,* 

7  Xenophpn,  Symposium  3,  5-6. 

8  Mem.,  i.   i,   19. 

9  Mem.,  i.  3,  a;  Hesiod,  Works  and  Days,  336. 


PLATO  185 

it  is  clear  that  he  is  trying  to  show  how  closely  in  line 
his  great  teacher  had  been  with  what  the  best  Athenians 
counted  real  religion.  With  all  these  types,  atheist  and 
traditional,  charlatan  and  genuine,  Plato  was  brought 
into  contact,  and  sooner  or  later  into  conflict. 

When  Plato  wrote  the  Laws,  he  traced  all  unholy  acts 
and  all  lawless  words  to  one  or  other  of  three  beliefs 
about  the  gods ;  a  man  who  acted  or  thought  amiss  must 
have  supposed  one  of  three  things — either  that  the  gods 
did  not  exist;  or,  secondly,  that  if  they  did  exist,  they 
took  no  care  of  man;  or,  thirdly,  that  they  could  easily 
be  appeased  by  sacrifices,  or  turned  from  their  course  by 
prayers.10  Perhaps  even  more  explicitly  he  said  the  same, 
in  earlier  days,  in  the  Republic : u  "Still  I  hear  a  voice 
saying  that  the  gods  cannot  be  deceived,  neither  can  they 
be  compelled.  But  what  if  there  are  no  gods?  or  suppose 
them  to  have  no  care  of  human  things — why  in  either 
case  should  we  mind  about  concealment?  And  even  if 
there  are  gods,  and  they  do  care  about  us,  yet  we  know 
of  them  only  from  tradition  and  the  genealogies  of  the 
poets;  and  these  are  the  very  persons  who  say  that  they 
may  be  influenced  and  turned  by  'sacrifices  and  soothing 
entreaties  and  by  offerings.' 12  Let  us  be  consistent,  then, 
and  believe  both  or  neither.  If  the  poets  speak  truly, 
why,  then,  we  had  better  be  unjust,  and  offer  of  the  fruits 
of  injustice;  for  if  we  are  just,  although  we  may  escape 
the  vengeance  of  heaven,  we  shall  lose  the  gains  of  in- 
justice; but  if  we  are  unjust  we  shall  keep  the  gains,  and 
by  our  sinning  and  praying  and  praying  and  sinning  the 
gods  will  be  propitiated,  and  we  shall  not  be  punished. 
'But  there  is  a  world  below  in  which  either  we  or  our 
posterity  will  suffer  for  our  unjust  deeds.'  Yes,  my 
friend,  that  will  be  the  reflection,  but  there  are  mysteries 

10  Laws,  x.  885. 

11  Rep.,  ii.  365  D. 

12  Referring  to  the  passage  quoted  before  in  364  D  from  Iliad,  ix.  497-501. 


186  PROGRESS  IN  RELIGION 

and  atoning  deities,  and  these  have  great  power.  That 
is  what  mighty  cities  declare;  and  the  children  of  the 
gods,  who  were  their  poets  and  prophets,  bear  a  like 
testimony." 

Thus  the  conception  of  God  is  not  an  abstract  thing, 
a  question  of  the  study;  it  becomes  the  most  practical 
thing  in  the  world,  the  centre  of  all  life;  and  on  it  de- 
pend character,  righteousness,  and  the  very  existence 
of  society.  Accordingly  nothing  is  so  relevant  to  the 
statesman  or  to  any  one  who  has  the  good  of  the  state 
at  heart  as  "the  type  of  divine  tale"  13  commonly  told  to 
the  young.  "God,"  Plato  says,  "must  always  be  repre- 
sented as  he  is,  whatever  the  sort  of  poetry  we  write, 
epic,  hymn  or  tragedy."  14  This  was  to  introduce  a  new 
principle,  at  once  into  theology  and  into  education;  for, 
so  far,  speculation  and  belief  about  the  gods  had  not 
commonly  been  considered  in  relation  either  to  conduct 
or  to  the  training  of  the  young.  The  orthodoxy  of  Aris- 
tophanes, of  popular  legend,  of  the  mysteries,  was  not 
inconsistent  with  the  ascription  of  the  most  disgusting 
savagery  and  obscenity  to  the  gods.  Heraclitus  15  had 
made  caustic  comment  on  the  combination  of  piety  and 
filth  which  still  prevailed  and  was  to  prevail  long  after 
Plato's  days;  but  Plato  was  more  in  the  heart  of  society 
than  Heraclitus,  he  was  less  a  critic  from  without  and 
more  constructive  in  both  instinct  and  attitude.  If  the 
ideal  life  of  men  and  women  and  states  is  to  be  attained, 
the  first  thing  is  to  "represent  God  as  he  really  is." 

The  very  foundations  of  education  were  thus  to  be 
changed.  Plato  left  no  shadow  of  doubt  about  his  mean- 
ing. Such  tales  as  that  of  Hephaistos  binding  his  mother 
Hera,  or  that  of  Zeus  sending  him  flying  for  taking  his 
mother's  part  when  she  was  being  beaten,  and  all  the 

13  Rep.,  ii.  379  A. 

14  Rep.,  ii.  379  A. 

15  See  chap.  IV,  p.  99. 


PLATO  187 

battles  of  the  gods  in  Homer  would  not  be  admitted  at 
all  in  an  ideal  state.16  Nor  must  we  listen  to  Homer  or 
any  other  poet  who  tells  us  that  two  jars  stand  at  the 
threshold  of  Zeus,  full  of  lots,  one  of  good  and  one  of 
evil,  and  that,  drawing  from  these  as  he  will,  Zeus  is 
dispenser  of  good  and  evil  to  us;  for  God  is  not  the 
author  of  evil  at  all.17  Nor  does  God  prompt  to  lies  or 
to  strife;  nor,  though  Aeschylus  said  it,  does  God  plant 
guilt  among  men  when  he  desires  utterly  to  destroy  a 
house.18  Nor  does  God  change  shape  or  take  disguise, 
or  indeed  submit  to  variation  at  all ;  for  God  is  no  wizard, 
and  God  will  not  lie; 19  nay,  God  cannot  lie:  "the  super- 
human and  divine  is  absolutely  incapable  of  falsehood; 
God  is  perfectly  simple  and  true  both  in  word  and 
deed."  20 

This  was  to  give  the  lie  direct  to  that  teaching  of 
Homer  in  which  the  majority  of  Plato's  contemporaries 
still  believed,  and  to  all  poets  who  modelled  themselves 
on  Homer.  There  was  "an  ancient  quarrel  between 
poetry  and  philosophy"  21 — there  always  is — so,  though 
"a  certain  friendship,  a  reverence,  from  the  days  of  boy- 
hood" checks  Plato  when  he  would  speak  of  Homer,  he 
speaks  none  the  less;  and  his  conviction  carries  him  fur- 
ther into  a  condemnation  of  a  great  deal  of  poetry  and  a 
great  many  poets.  "We  will  fall  down  and  worship  him 
[this  genius  in  "imitation"]  as  a  sweet  and  holy  and 
wonderful  being;  but  we  must  also  inform  him  that  in 
our  state  such  as  he  are  not  permitted  to  exist;  the  law 
will  not  allow  them.  And  so  when  we  have  anointed  him 
with  myrrh,  and  set  a  garland  of  wool  upon  his  head,  we 
shall  send  him  away  to  another  city.  For  we  mean  to 

16  Rep.,  ii.  378  D. 

IT  Rep.,  ii.   379  E;  Iliad,   ii.  69;  xx.;   Rep.,  ii.  379  C,   D,  referring  to  Iliad, 
xxiv.  527. 

18  Aeschylus,  fragm.   160. 

19  Rep.,  ii.  381  E. 

20  Rep.,  ii.  382  E. 

21  Rep.,  x.  607  B. 


188  PROGRESS  IN  RELIGION 

employ  for  our  soul's  health  the  rougher  and  severer 
poet  or  story-teller  only." 

To  this  criticism  of  Homer  there  was  already  current 
a  type  of  reply  which  long  survived.  There  were  hidden 
meanings  in  the  great  poet.  Theagenes  of  Rhegium 
about  525  B.C.  began  the  allegorical  interpretation  of 
Homer;  Hera  was  the  air,  Aphrodite  was  love;  moral 
and  physical  meanings  intermingled  and  confused  the 
story.28  This  was  a  game  at  which  everybody  could 
play — and  did  play,  more  and  more  as  men  grew  pro- 
gressively uneasy  about  the  truth  and  value  of  the  tradi- 
tions and  legends  inherited  from  the  ancient  days;  and 
the  method  passed  from  Greek  students  of  Homer  to 
Hebrew  students  of  the  Old  Testament  and  to  the  Chris- 
tian church.  It  flourishes  independently  in  India  to- 
day; the  legends  of  the  gods  and  their  representations  in 
art  may  strike  the  uninitiated  grossly,  but  they  are  ren- 
derings of  philosophic  and  mystical  truth.  And  the  same 
retort  avails,  and  admits  of  no  reply.  "Shimga  goes 
but  its  songs  remain,"  is  the  Marathi  proverb  about  the 
festival  of  the  god  of  Kondoba;  mystical  or  not,  the 
songs  are  obscene  and  have  their  effect.  "We  must  not 
receive"  the  stories  of  Homer  "into  our  state,"  says 
Plato,  "whether  they  are  allegories  or  not  allegories."  2* 
A  young  man  cannot  judge  what  is  allegory  and  what  is 
not;  and  anything  that  he  receives  into  his  mind  at  that 
age  is  hard  to  wash  out,  and  is  unalterable.  So  it  is  the 
more  important  that  what  they  hear  first  should  be  stories 
of  beauty  that  direct  the  mind  to  "excellence." 

Plato's  thought  centred  upon  God ;  and  he  realised,  as 
any  man  will  who  is  serious,  how  God  outgoes  our  best 
thoughts.  In  a  long  life  of  eighty  years  a  mind  so  active 

22  Rep.,  iii.  398  A. 

28  See  Gomperz,  Greek  Thinkers,  i.  pp.  379,  574;  C.  H.  Moore,  Religious 
Thought  of  the  Greeks,  p.  350. 

24  Rep.,  ii.  378  D,  E.  It  seems  that  Plato's  contemporary  Metrodorus,  a 
pupil  of  Anaxagoras,  explained  that  Agamemnon  was  the  aether. 


PLATO  189 

must  have  many  conceptions  of  God;  and  it  is  possible 
to  say  that  not  so  much  any  single  conception,  or  even 
an  attempt  to  link  and  harmonise  as  many  as  may  be  of 
those  conceptions,  is  so  significant  as  the  fact  that  the 
man  is  in  the  great  succession  of  the  "God-intoxicated," 
that  he  is  always  thinking  of  God,  that  God  is  his  centre, 
his  atmosphere,  his  universe.  Commentators  will  of 
course  vary,  age  by  age,  in  their  interpretation  of  his 
ideas,  as  they  do  in  Paul's  case;  all  depends  on  what 
element  in  the  teacher's  experience  touches  most  closely 
experience  of  their  own.  It  was  Plato's  belief,  Professor 
Burnet  says,20  that  no  philosophical  truth  could  be  com- 
municated in  writing  at  all;  it  was  only  by  some  sort  of 
immediate  contact  that  one  soul  could  kindle  the  flame  in 
another.  The  novelist  William  de  Morgan  put  Plato's 
idea  in  the  language  of  our  day — "the  congenial  soil  in 
which  the  fruit  of  Intelligence  ripens  is  Suggestion,  and 
the  wireless  telegraphs  of  the  mind  are  the  means  by 
which  it  rejoices  to  communicate."  26  A  good  deal  de- 
pends on  the  "receiver" ;  if  that  instrument  has  defects — 
and  most  have — the  message  will  not  be  complete;  things 
will  not  be  in  the  same  proportion  as  when  transmitted. 
Plato  and  Paul  have  "communicated"  to  all  sorts  of  "re- 
ceivers," and  the  emphasis  has  been  found  all  over  the 
message,  now  here  and  now  there.  This  clash  of  inter- 
pretation is  supremely  of  use;  it  tells  of  the  teacher's 
greatness  and  variety,  and  it  means  quickening.  "The 
Maker  and  Father  of  this  all,"  says  Plato,  "it  is  a  hard 
task  to  find;  and  when  a  man  has  found  him,  it  is  im- 
possible to  declare  him  to  all  men"  27 — a  significant  con- 
fession which  the  sympathetic  Clement  of  Alexandria 
loved  to  quote. 

I  do  not  propose  to  discuss  in  its  variety  and  pro- 

25  Burnet,   Greek  Philosophy,   Part  I.  p.   I. 

26  William  de  Morgan,  Somehow  Good,  p.  331. 

27  Timaeus,  28  C. 


190  PROGRESS  IN  RELIGION 

fundity  the  teaching  of  Plato  upon  God;  but,  by  recall- 
ing a  few  outstanding  features  of  that  teaching,  by  quot- 
ing again  a  few  well-known  sayings,  to  try  to  show  how 
they  bear  on  the  line  of  inquiry  which  we  have  been 
following.  So  far,  we  have  seen  Greek  gods  achieve 
personality,  at  the  cost  of  coming  under  a  law  of  right- 
eousness which  made  them  progressively  impossible;  and 
we  have  seen  philosophers  speculating,  with  little  thought 
of  the  divine  as  men  conceived  it,  as  to  what  was  the 
origin  of  the  universe,  what  underlies  it,  what  it  is.  They 
leaned  a  great  deal  to  physical  substance — "Water  is 
best,"  quotes  Pindar — sometimes  to  what  we  should  call 
force,  for  "fire"  is  surely  what  our  physicists  call  "heat," 
though  the  conceptions  are  not  quite  the  same.  Anaxa- 
goras  lifted  the  subject  to  a  higher  plane  when  he  said 
"Mind,"  and  then  left  it  there,  as  Socrates  complains,  to 
decline  to  the  discussion  of  "air  and  ether  and  water  and 
other  eccentricities."  28 

Now,  whatever  the  commentators  conclude  to  have 
been  the  eventual  relation  of  God  and  "the  idea  of  good," 
the  very  suggestion  that  there  might  be  any  relation  at 
all  between  them  is  an  immense  step  forward ;  for  it  links 
God  at  once  with  all  existence  and  on  its  most  spiritual 
side,  and  it  gives  to  the  universe  a  moral  unity  and  in- 
telligibility, a  certain  warmth  too  and  value,  which  it  had 
not  had  before.  Plato's  contribution  may  be  measured 
when  we  compare  his  view  with  that  of  Diogenes  of 
A'pollonia  a  generation  or  less  earlier,  that  Air  is  the 
basis  of  all  and  has  intelligence  and  is  good.29  At  all 
events  God  was  not  to  be  swamped  in  physical  theory; 
and  here  it  is  well  to  recall  that  the  Pantheism  on  which 
the  Stoics  were  continually  falling  back,  in  spite  of  splen- 
did maxims  which  seemed  to  imply  the  personality  of 
God,  Plato  counted  as  equivalent  to  atheism.  God  is 

28  Plato,  Phaedo,  97,  98.  29  See  p.  174. 


PLATO  191 

not  a  "form"  but  a  soul,  the  self-moved  mover  of  the 
best  motions.30  We  touch  here  the  borders  of  the  most 
difficult  of  the  problems  of  thought,  questions  hard 
enough  for  us  still,  that  wake  in  ourselves  the  cry  of 
Plato  that  "it  is  hard  to  find  God";  but  enough  is  said, 
perhaps,  to  show  how  the  whole  question  has  been  moved 
forward  by  the  long  work  of  Plato. 

The  ancients  were  divided  as  to  whether  the  Timaeus 
was  to  be  reckoned  with  the  myths  of  Plato,  or  was  to 
be  taken  literally,  whether  it  represented  Plato's  own 
doctrine  or  not.  In  any  case  it  was  a  fertile  work.  In 
it  Plato  explains  why  God  made  (as  we  say)  or  took  in 
hand  the  universe:  "He  was  good,  and  the  good  has 
never  at  any  time  a  feeling  of  jealousy  towards  anything, 
so  he  wished  everything  to  become  as  like  himself  as 
possible"  (29  E).  Three  points  here  may  receive  com- 
ment. Greeks  believed  for  ages  that  "the  divine  is  en- 
vious," but  Plato  says  with  emphasis  here  and  elsewhere 
that  "Envy  stands  without  the  divine  chorus."  31  Like- 
ness to  God  is,  according  to  Plato,  the  end  and  object 
of  creation,  and  it  is  the  aim  of  every  man  who  sees 
aright  to  become  like  God.  Protagoras  had  taught  that 
"man  was  the  measure  of  all,"  truth  was  what  a  man 
made  it,  the  individual  was  his  own  standard.  With  this 
doctrine  in  his  mind,  Plato  in  the  Laws  (iv.  716  C) 
says  explicitly  that  "God  would  be  measure  of  all  things 
most  really  and  far  more  than  any  man,  as  the  saying 
goes."  God  being  the  measure  or  the  standard,  creation 
moves  to  his  likeness,  and  man,  "heavenly  plant  and  not 
of  earth,"  finds  his  true  nature  in  "likeness  to  God." 
"He  who  would  be  dear  to  God,"  Plato  continues  after 
his  allusion  to  Protagoras,  "must,  as  far  as  possible,  be 
like  him  and  such  as  he  is.  The  man  who  rules  himself 

SO  Burnet,  Greek  Philosophy,  Part  I.  p.  337. 
31  Phaedrus,  247  A. 


192  PROGRESS  IN  RELIGION 

is  the  friend  of  God,  for  he  is  like  him."  "As  far  as 
possible" — the  phrase  recurs,  for  Plato  finds  a  refractory 
element,  an  "errant  cause"  yr^avao^rrj  atria)  in  the 
universe,  which  resists  the  efforts  of  God  and  man. 
Mind  is  confronted  by  Necessity,  Nous  by  Ananke;  "even 
gods  cannot  fight  with  necessity,"  Simonides  had  once 
said  (viii.  20) ;  and  the  word  comes  again  in  Plato,  hard 
to  interpret  exactly,  but  not  far  from  our  experience. 
"Evils,  Theodorus,"  says  Socrates  in  the  Theaetetus 
(176  A),  "can  never  quite  pass  away;  of  necessity  there 
must  be  something  somehow  antagonistic  to  good.  Yet 
they  have  no  abode  among  the  gods;  that  cannot  be; 
but  of  necessity  they  haunt  mortal  nature  and  this  earthly 
sphere.  So  we  must  endeavour  to  escape  hence  to  yonder 
with  all  speed.  And  our  escape  is  to  become  like  God 
so  far  as  we  can,  and  to  become  like  him  is  to  become 
righteous  and  holy,  not  without  wisdom." 

However,  to  return  to  the  making  of  the  world :  though 
God  thought  out  creatures  of  air  and  sea  and  land,  he 
did  not  himself  make  them,  but  delegated  their  creation 
to  intermediate  gods  whom  he  had  made — gods,  but 
neither  immortal  nor  beyond  dissolution  altogether,  yet 
exempt  from  dissolution  and  death  because  they  had  in 
his  will  a  bond  mightier  and  more  sovereign.  He  would 
not  himself  create  the  lower  beings,  for,  if  by  his  hands 
they  were  made  and  from  him  received  their  life,  they 
would  be  equal  to  gods.  So  upon  the  gods,  whom  he 
addresses  in  a  strange  phrase  as  "gods  of  gods,"  he  lays 
the  charge  of  making  the  other  beings,  but  he  gives  them 
an  element  of  soul  that  they  may  interweave  mortal  with 
immortal.32  So  came  man,  with  being;  and  his  ultimate 
Author,  according  to  this  myth,  is  at  an  infinite  distance 
in  the  heavens,  out  of  contact  with  the  world  of  evil.83 

32  Titnaeus,  41  A-D. 

S3  Adam,  Religious  Teachers  of  Greece,  p.  372. 


PLATO  193 

These  intermediate  gods,  some  of  them  stars,34  whatever 
be  the  measure  of  stress  that  Plato  meant  to  lay  upon 
them,  were  disastrous  in  the  later  development  of  re- 
ligion. A  later  age  hardens  the  suggestions  of  genius 
into  authority  and  makes  dogma  out  of  the  phrase,  the 
playful  word,  the  myth  that  carries  no  such  weight  for 
the  man  who  made  it. 

Plato  was  not  a  Thomas  Aquinas,  at  the  end  of  an 
age  developing  and  bringing  to  full  expression  concep- 
tions exhausted,  and  destined  soon  to  be  thrown  aside. 
He  was  a  pioneer,  a  radical,  a  reformer.  With  his  con- 
ception of  righteousness  as  progressive  likeness  to  God 
he  could  have  nothing  but  contempt  for  "the  noble 
Hesiod"  85  and  his  prudential  virtues — the  good  peasant's 
faith  that  piety  makes  the  crop  heavier  and  the  fleece 
thicker.  "Still  gayer  (reav IHCOTS pa)  are  the  blessings 
that  Musaeus  and  his  son  Eumolpus  gave  the  righteous 
at  the  hand  of  the  gods;  they  take  them  down  into  the 
world  below,  in  their  story,  and  make  them  lie  on 
couches,  a  banquet  of  the  holy,  and  picture  them  gar- 
landed, passing  their  whole  time  drunk ;  their  idea  seems 
to  be  that  the  fairest  reward  of  virtue  is  immortal 
drunkenness.  This  is  the  style  in  which  they  praise  jus- 
tice." 88  This  was  not  excessive  parody,  it  rested  on  evi- 
dence; and  it  shows  how  far  removed  from  common 
belief  was  Plato's  conception  of  the  real  nature  of  right- 
eousness and  its  real  significance.  People  praised  not 
"righteousness  itself"  87  but  the  advantages  that  accrue 
from  an  established  reputation  for  righteousness;  and 
one  great  problem  of  the  Republic  is  to  show  that  right- 
eousness or  justice,  even  if  stripped  of  every  advantage 
and  associated  with  all  the  penalties  of  unsuccessful  un- 

34  Cf.  C.  C.  J.  Webb,  Studies,  p.  125. 

35  Rep.,  ii.  363  B;  Hesiod,  Works  and  Days,  p.  230. 
aeRep.,  ii.  363  C. 

37  Rep.,  ii.  361  C. 


194  PROGRESS  IN  RELIGION 

righteousness,  is  none  the  less  worth  while.  If  we  define 
it  as  likeness  to  God,  and  conceive  of  God  and  the  uni- 
verse as  Plato  did,  then  Hesiod  and  Musaeus  and  the 
moralists  of  the  market-place  are  talking  of  what  they 
do  not  understand  and  with  the  irrelevance  of  funda- 
mental ignorance. 

With  their  notions  of  divine  reward  and  punishment, 
Plato  swept  away  as  indignantly  their  conceptions  of 
relation  with  God.  If  God  is  without  envy,  these 
teachers,  one  would  presume,  would  conclude  with  the 
modern  animist  that  it  is  waste  of  time  to  conciliate  him; 
a  good  God  does  not  come  into  practical  politics;  it  is 
gods  who  are  envious  and  evil  who  hold  the  central  place 
in  every-day  religion — so  much  is  evident  to  the  prudent. 
But  the  idea  that  gods  can  be  bought  to  frustrate  justice, 
can  be  influenced  by  entreaties  and  by  gifts,  though 
Homer  be  quoted  in  its  support,  is  blasphemous.  Men- 
dicant prophets  may  go  to  the  rich  men's  doors  and  per- 
suade them  that  they  have  a  power  committed  to  them 
by  the  gods  of  making  atonement  for  a  man's  own  sins 
or  his  ancestor's  sins  by  sacrifices  or  charms,  and  to  heal 
them  in  a  course  of  pleasures  and  feasts;  they  may  quote 
the  books  of  Musaeus  and  Orpheus; 38  but  it  is  all  im- 
moral, irreligious,  and  a  negation  of  the  real  truth  about 
God  and  righteousness.  It  is  not  on  such  lines  that  access 
will  be  found  to  a  good  God  whose  chief  concern  is  to 
have  his  creatures  good  and  like  himself  to  the  utter- 
most. Escape  from  the  body  (soma),  the  "tomb" 
(sema)  of  the  immortal  soul,  is  the  real  way  to  God; 
and  Plato  leans  unmistakably  to  what  later  days  called 
asceticism  and  commended  as  the  one  path  that  can  take 
men  out  of  the  sensuous  and  the  material;  he  too  urges 
"withdrawing  from  the  body  so  far  as  the  conditions  of 

39  Rep.,  ii.  364  B,  E. 


PLATO  195 

life  allow/'  "dishonouring,"  mortifying  it,  and  "making 
life  one  long  study  for  death."  89 

If  Plato  dismisses  the  whole  apparatus,  intellectual  and 
mechanical,  of  sacrifice,  he  must  find  some  other  means 
of  contact  or  relation  between  the  human  soul  and  God. 
For,  as  we  have  seen,  the  development  of  experience  had 
been  calling  for  it,  and  the  strength  of  the  mystery-cults 
and  the  less  regular  initiations  lay  in  their  promise  of 
effecting  it.  Plato  finds  the  secret  of  this  contact  with 
heaven  in  the  very  nature  of  the  soul  itself.  When  the 
great  God  set  the  gods  of  his  creation  to  create  in  turn 
the  rest  of  beings,  he  himself  gave  them,  as  we  saw,  the 
element  of  soul  that  they  might  interweave  immortal 
with  mortal.  So  Plato  puts  it  in  the  form  of  myth ;  but, 
whatever  suggestion  of  "non-demonstration"  (to  use  the 
word  of  Euripides)  recourse  to  myth  may  carry,  it  was 
the  fixed  and  reasoned  belief  of  Plato  that  the  soul  is  of 
divine  origin  despite  its  earthly  wrappings.  Here  as 
elsewhere  he  comes  near  the  Orphic  position,  and  his 
language  has,  or  seems  to  have,  echoes  of  Orphic  phrase ; 
but  his  contempt  for  Orphic  priests  and  teachers,  and 
his  insistence  on  reason,  make  it  clear  that  he  must  have 
another  and  very  different  basis  from  that  of  Orphic 
religion.  Had  not  Socrates  suggested  that  virtue,  if  it 
does  not  understand  itself,  is  no  better  than  vice?  A 
religious  conviction  must  rest  on  some  less  sandy  foun- 
dation than  feeling.  Right  opinion,  he  says  in  the  Meno 
(98  A),  is  like  the  miraculous  images  of  Daedalus,  apt 
to  run  away  unless  fastened  down;  and  the  fastening  is 
the  "consideration  of  the  cause,"  and  this  gives  it  "the 
nature  of  knowledge,"  and  with  it  security.  If,  for  the 
moment,  he  is  dealing  with  "recollection"  as  "the  tie  of 

39  Cf.   R.   W.   Livingstone,   Greek   Genius,  p.   191;   Phaedo.   65-7;    Phaedrvi, 
350;  Rep.,  611. 


196  PROGRESS  IN  RELIGION 

the  cause,"  he  means  more.  Recollection  points  to  some- 
thing larger  and  of  greater  scope;  it  is  a  phase  of  the 
soul's  activity,  which  follows  from  its  nature;  and  the 
whole  must  be  understood,  if  the  part  is  to  be  intelligible; 
the  two  go  together.  There  must  be  some  fundamental 
kinship  between  the  soul  and  the  nature  of  reality  (what- 
ever it  prove  to  be),  if  there  is  to  be  any  knowledge  that 
is  more  than  fancy  or  guessing. 

In  the  Meno  (81)  Plato  quotes  certain  wise  men  and 
women,  priests  and  priestesses  and  poets  (like  Pindar 
and  other  inspired  men),  for  the  "true  and  splendid" 
belief  that  the  soul  of  man  is  immortal  and  at  one  time 
has  an  end,  which  is  termed  dying,  and  at  another  time 
is  born  again,  but  is  never  destroyed.  To  cite  such 
authority  is  playful  "irony" ;  he  means  to  base  the  belief 
on  something  more,  and  what  immediately  follows  goes 
far  beyond  priest  and  priestess,  and  if  it  rests  on  "in- 
spiration," it  is  on  Plato's  own  inspiration.  "The  soul, 
as  being  immortal,  and  having  been  born  many  times, 
and  having  seen  all  things  that  are,  whether  in  this  world 
or  in  the  world  below,  has  knowledge  of  them  all;  and 
it  is  no  wonder  that  she  should  be  able  to  call  to  remem- 
brance all  that  she  knows  about  virtue,  for,  since  all 
nature  is  akin  and  the  soul  has  learned  all  things,  there 
is  no  difficulty  in  eliciting,  or,  as  men  say,  learning,  all 
out  of  a  single  recollection,  if  a  man  is  strenuous  and 
does  not  faint;  for  all  inquiry  and  all  learning  is  but 
recollection." 

In  the  Phaedrus*0  in  the  famous  picture  of  the 
charioteer  with  the  two  horses,  one  noble  and  one  ig- 
noble— a  symbol  of  the  soul,  guided  by  reason  and  drawn 
by  spirit  and  passion 41 — Plato  describes  how  the  im- 
mortal soul  rises  into  the  ideal  world,  there  to  behold 

40  Jowett's  words,  in  introduction  and  translation,  are  freely  used  in  what 
follows. 

41  Phaedrus,  253,  254. 


PLATO  197 

beauty,  wisdom,  goodness  and  the  other  things  of  God 
by  which  the  soul  is  nourished,  to  behold  Zeus,  lord  of 
heaven,  as  he  goes  forth  in  his  winged  chariots  and  the 
array  of  gods  and  demi-gods  and  of  human  souls  in  their 
train — glorious  and  blessed  sights  in  the  interior  of 
heaven,  and  he  who  will  may  freely  behold  them;  for 
jealousy  has  no  place  in  that  divine  chorus.  The  gods 
can  rise  still  higher,  for  the  horses  in  their  chariots  are 
all  noble,  and  they  behold  the  world  beyond — "of  the 
heaven  which  is  above  the  heavens  no  earthly  poet  has 
sung  or  ever  will  sing  in  a  worthy  manner."  That  is  the 
sphere  of  true  knowledge.  The  divine  intelligence,  and 
that  of  every  other  soul  rightly  nourished,  is  fed  upon 
mind  and  pure  knowledge;  and  it  is  with  that  such  souls 
gaze  on  Being,  that  they  feed  on  the  sight  of  Truth,  and 
behold  Justice,  Temperance  and  Knowledge  absolute. 
So  the  gods  live;  but  with  human  souls  the  sight  of  that 
world  beyond  is  fugitive,  the  driving  of  the  steeds  is 
hard ;  but  he  who  is  most  like  God,  and  best  follows  God, 
sees  most.  The  vision  passes,  but  the  memory  of  it 
abides;  and  in  this  world  the  sight  of  beauty  recalls  that 
ideal  beauty  which  the  soul  has  seen  on  high ;  this  is  love. 
"Love  therefore  is  the  intermediary  between  God  and 
man,  the  desire  of  the  beautiful  which  is  also  the  good, 
an  earnest  of  the  divine  excellence  which  resides  in 
heaven,  simple  and  unalloyed."  42  Perhaps  for  an  Eng- 
lish reader  the  best  rendering  of  Plato  is  to  be  found 
in  Spenser's  Hymnes  in  Honour  of  Love  and  Beautie, 
and  in  their  sequels  upon  Heavenly  Love  and  Heavenly 
Beautie.  So  Plato 

Buries  us  with  a  glory,  young  once  more, 
Pouring  heaven  into  the  shut  house  of  earth. 

42  R.  W.  Livingstone,  Greek  Genius,  p.   185;  quoting  Phaedrus,  247-251  on. 


198  PROGRESS  IN  RELIGION 

The  soul  that  is  capable  of  such  vision  of  God  is  akin 
to  God,  must  be,  cannot  but  be;  and  it  is  susceptible  of 
likeness  to  God  if  it  keep  the  eyes  open  for  Truth.  That 
is  the  real  preparation  for  the  world  beyond — the  quest 
of  Truth.  For  the  world  beyond  is  real  and  earnest; 
judgment  and  righteousness  are  the  foundation  of  all 
existence,  and  in  all  existence  there  is  nothing  so  real 
as  soul,  the  gift  of  God  from  his  own  nature.  "Every 
soul  is  immortal."  43 

Such,  in  rough  and  stammering  summary,  is  the  teach- 
ing of  Plato.  Argument  and  myth  are  interwoven,  as 
reason  and  intuition  work  together  to  point  the  mind  to 
truth.  Reason  is  not  intuition,  nor  is  myth  argument,  as 
Euripides  saw;  and  Plato  was  no  duller-witted  than  the 
great  poet  himself,  but  he  saw  in  intuition  a  promise 
which  Euripides  did  not.  "We  drift  upon  myths  to  no 
purpose,"  said  the  poet.4*  "I  dare  say,"  we  read  in  the 
Phaedo  (85  C),  "that  you,  Socrates,  feel  as  I  do,  how 
very  hard  or  almost  impossible  is  the  attainment  of  any 
certainty  about  questions  such  as  these  in  the  present  life. 
And  yet  I  should  deem  him  a  coward  who  did  not  test 
what  is  said  about  them  to  the  uttermost,  or  whose  heart 
failed  him  before  he  had  examined  them  on  every  side. 
For  he  should  persevere  until  he  has  attained  one  of  two 
things:  either  he  should  discover  and  learn  the  truth 
about  them;  or,  if  this  is  impossible,  I  would  have  him 
take  the  best  and  most  irrefragable  of  human  words 
(Ao'j/oi),  and  let  this  be  the  raft  upon  which  he  sails 
through  life — not  without  risk,  as  I  admit — if  he  can- 
not find  some  word  of  God  which  will  more  surely  and 
safely  carry  him."  And  in  the  moral  law  Plato  found 
his  raft.  "Of  all  that  has  been  said"  in  the  Gorgias,  the 
dialogue  concludes  (52) :  "Nothing  remains  unshaken 
but  the  saying  that  to  do  injustice  is  more  to  be  avoided 

43  Phaedrus,  245.  44  Hippoiytus,  197. 


PLATO  199 

than  to  suffer  injustice,  and  that  the  reality  and  not  the 
appearance  of  virtue  is  to  be  followed  above  all  things 
.  .  .  for  you  will  never  come  to  any  harm  in  the  prac- 
tice of  virtue,  if  you  are  a  really  good  and  true  man." 
As  for  the  myths,  "a  man  of  sense  will  not  insist  that 
these  things  are  exactly  as  I  have  described  them.  But 
I  think  he  will  believe  that  something  of  the  kind  is  true 
of  the  soul  and  her  habitations." 

God,  then,  and  the  soul  and  righteousness  are  the  fixed 
points  in  religion,  and  in  all  time  and  all  existence  they 
belong  together  and  cannot  be  thought  of  apart.  This 
is  the  great  contribution  of  Plato.  Greek  thought  had  been 
moving  tentatively  to  this  conclusion  for  centuries ;  Plato 
gave  it  an  immense  lift  forward.  That  he  did  not  solve 
all  the  questions,  a  genius  of  such  glory  did  not  need  to 
be  told;  his  critics  have  never  been  his  peers.  He  left 
gaps  and  difficulties;  his  star-gods  made  trouble;  he 
seemed  to  fluctuate  between  God,  gods  and  the  vague 
"divine,"  perhaps  wavering  less  than  the  phrase  of  the 
moment  suggested  to  duller  minds,  perhaps  still  hovering 
over  a  difficult  question.  But  he  became  the  teacher  of 
all  the  thoughtful,  of  all  the  religious.  They  fell  far 
below  him;  but,  till  he  became  a  canon  and  a  dogma, 
Plato  was  to  every  age  of  the  Greek  world,  and  to  all 
who  have  loved  that  world,  though  born  themselves 

Beyond  the  sea,  beyond  Atlantic  bounds," 

an  inspiration  and  a  glory.  "It  is  written  in  its  nature 
that  the  soul  takes  wings,"  said  Longinus,  "at  the  very 
sight  of  the  true  sublime,  and  soars  on  high  with  proud 
uprising,  as  full  of  joy  and  triumph  as  if  she  had  herself 
produced  what  she  sees."  46  And  that  has  been  the  con- 
stant effect  of  Plato's  teaching. 

45  Euripides,  Hippoiytus,    1053. 

46  Longinus,  On  the  Sublime,  vii.  2. 


IX 
THE  GREEK  WORLD  AFTER  ALEXANDER 

THE  age  of  Greece  which  Homer  sums  up  is  far  removed 
from  that  which  reaches  from  Heraclitus  to  Pericles; 
but  hardly  less  is  the  difference  in  character  between 
Periclean  Athens  and  the  Hellenistic  cities  of  Antioch 
and  Alexandria.  Thought  and  society  react  on  each 
other.  An  age  when  social  landmarks  are  swept  bodily 
away  will,  as  we  have  seen,  show  great  changes  in  the 
ideas  of  men;  the  fundamental  preconceptions  will  be 
altered.  Even  a  very  short  experience  of  social  chaos 
will  shatter  men's  best-established  intellectual  cosmos, 
and  conversely  a  new  idea  will  revolutionise  society. 
France  took  seriously  the  idea  of  equality  with  liberty, 
and  her  revolution  was  the  precursor  of  a  revolution  still 
greater,  if  less  vividly  dramatic,  over  the  whole  world. 
The  idea  of  the  survival  of  the  fittest,  and  the  philosophy 
moulded  upon  it,  have  already  bad  results,  but  the  full 
outcome  of  them  we  cannot  even  forecast.  The  sophistic 
movement  in  Greece  is  beyond  doubt  connected  with  the 
Greek  expansion  over  the  Mediterranean,  and  the  de- 
velopment of  the  Greek  city,  and  above  all  of  the  Greek 
individual.  The  age  produced  by  such  factors  could  not 
be  like  that  pictured  by  Homer,  however  strong  the 
family  likeness. 

It  is  a  commonplace  that,  while  Aristotle  was  making 
his  collection  of  the  constitutions  of  the  Greek  cities, 
Alexander,  as  much  by  his  career  as  by  any  action  in 
particular,  had  relegated  the  cities  and  their  constitutions 
to  the  dead  and  irrecoverable  past.  Even  with  the  Eu- 

200 


GREEK  WORLD  AFTER  ALEXANDER     201 

ropean  war  fresh  in  our  memories,  with  the  new  Europe 
and  its  new  nations  before  our  eyes,  its  new  politics  and 
principles,  the  League  of  Nations  and  the  direct  action 
of  labour  upon  the  state,  it  is  hard  for  us  to  realise  how 
completely  a  short  span  of  years  may  transform  the 
world.  Philip  of  Macedon  died  in  338  B.C.  ;  it  was  to  be 
expected  that  his  empire  would  fall  to  pieces,  that  the 
people  he  had  welded  would  break  up  into  its  original 
tribes,  that  Macedon  would  be  again  in  the  welter  of 
civil  war  with  no  principle  beyond  the  interest  of  this 
pretender  and  that,  that  Greece  would  go  on  as  before, 
weakening  herself  as  one  city  claimed  and  lost  leadership 
of  the  Greek  world  after  another.  "The  thing  that  hath 
been,  it  is  that  which  shall  be"  (Eccles.  i.  9).  But  it  was 
not  to  be.  Fifteen  years  later  Philip's  successor  died — 
not  in  Greece,  not  in  Macedon,  but  in  Babylon.  The 
world  he  left  was  as  little  like  the  world  he  found,  as 
the  nineteenth-century  Europe  was  like  the  fifteenth- 
century  Europe. 

Alexander  had  led  his  conquering  Macedonians  to 
lands  that  lay  almost  beyond  the  knowledge  of  man. 
Of  Indians  Greeks  had  long  spoken,  but  not  with  much 
very  close  knowledge.  Herodotus  tells  us  that  early 
morning  is  the  hottest  part  of  the  day  in  India  and  that 
the  heat  grows  less  towards  noon.1  So  the  historian  had 
conjectured  on  the  basis  of  his  physical  theories  scarcely 
more  than  a  century  before,  but  Alexander's  soldiers 
knew  better  when  to  look  for  the  cool  of  the  day  in  the 
Pan  jab.  Common  men  had  ranged  outside  the  map,  had 
seen  things  and  been  in  places  which  in  the  great  days 
of  Greece  had  been  almost  mythical.  The  God  Dionysus, 
legend  said,  had  conquered  the  world,  but  a  later  day 
modelled  his  adventures  on  those  of  Alexander — a  fact 

1  Herodotus,  iii.  104;  but  see  H.  G.  Rawlinson,  Intercourse  between  India 
and  the  Western  World,  pp.  21-24,  for  the  real  knowledge  of  India  shown  by 
Herodotus. 


202  PROGRESS  IN  RELIGION 

that  may  serve  as  a  sort  of  symbol  for  us.2  Alexander, 
then,  had  given  the  world  a  new  Geography,  vastly 
larger  than  it  had  had  before,  and  based  on  knowledge; 
for,  beside  marching  over  strange  lands  himself,  he  had 
sent  his  admirals  to  explore  the  rivers  and  the  Southern 
Sea; 3  and  he  involved  the  whole  ancient  world  in  new 
conceptions  of  godhead.  Dionysus  was  not  the  only  god 
to  feel  his  influence ;  all  of  them  felt  it,  as  all  the  human 
inhabitants  of  the  world  felt  it.  Life  in  every  aspect 
responded  to  the  new  knowledge  and  the  new  conditions. 
The  great  new  idea  of  Alexander  has  been  summed 
up  as  "the  marriage  of  Europe  and  Asia" — an  epigram 
and  an  ideal  to  which  he  gave  symbolic  form,  in  a  ter- 
ribly concrete  way,  by  marrying  some  thousands  of  cap- 
tive Oriental  women  to  his  Macedonians.*  What  befel 
the  victims  of  this  experiment  in  idealism,  when  the  lord 
of  the  husbands  died  at  Babylon,  we  are  not  told.  A 
prosaic  mind  might  have  prophesied  failure  for  that 
experiment  and  for  the  larger  experiment  of  uniting  Asia 
and  Europe  in  one  kingdom  under  one  head.  The  king- 
dom endured  for  the  last  two  or  three  years  of  Alex- 
ander's reign,  and  then  it  fell  to  pieces;  it  too  was  a 
failure.  It  is  the  function  of  prosaic  minds  to  predict 
failure  almost  automatically.  But  it  is  only  the  practical 
people  who  fail  utterly;  if  the  first  crude  embodiments 
of  the  great  ideas  come  to  nothing,  the  ideas  do  not 
perish.  The  long  Persian  wars,  the  long  intrigues  of  the 
Persian  court  with  the  dominant  cities  of  Greece — were 
they  the  real  world,  or  a  hideous  perversion  of  it?  Was 
the  East  East  and  the  West  West;  were  the  twain  never 
to  meet?  Or  was  the  world  one,  and  humanity  one — 
the  bright  varieties  of  race  and  speech  and  religion  all 

2  Cf.    story   quoted   but   not   believed   by   Arrian,    Anabasis,    vi.    28,    about   a 
triumph  celebrated   in  Carmania  by  Alexander  in  the  style  of  Dionysus.     See 
W.   S.   Ferguson,  Hellenistic  Athens,   p.   12,  n. 

3  See  Arrian,  Anabasis,  vi.   18,   19,  20. 

4  Arrian,  Anabasis,  vii.  4,  4-8. 


GREEK  WORLD  AFTER  ALEXANDER     203 

significant  of  a  higher  life  yet  to  be,  all  contributions  to 
an  ideal  mankind?  Once  Greek  travellers  and  thinkers 
had  unconsciously  accepted  the  larger  world;  Xeno- 
phanes  had  corrected  Colophon  by  North  Africa, 
Herodotus  had  drawn  on  Egyptians,  Persians,  and  even 
Scythians  for  ideas  that  would  enrich  Greece;  Xenophon 
had  sketched  the  ideal  ruler  in  the  Persian  Cyrus.  But 
the  intrigues  of  peace  perhaps  had  effected  what  open 
war  had  not,  or  it  may  be  that  Greek  culture  grown  self- 
conscious  was  alone  to  blame;  Greece  had  committed 
herself  to  the  view  that  the  Greek  is  Nature's  aristocrat, 
the  rest  of  men  slaves  by  Nature's  design  in  many  cases, 
and  nowhere  much  better.5  It  was  a  shock  to  this  frame 
of  mind  to  see  Macedon  rise  swiftly  in  twenty  years 
from  being  a  welter  of  tribes  and  cantons  to  be  mistress 
of  the  Greek  world.  But  the  shock  was  softened  by  the 
reflection  that  Macedonians  were  a  sort  of  Greeks — not 
the  best  sort,  but  poor  relations,  a  cadet  branch  if  not 
a  shade  illegitimate,  intellectually  unequal,  but  Greek 
enough  to  save  the  theory.6  The  Persian  nobles  with 
whom  Alexander  consorted,  with  whose  daughters  he 
and  his  captains  married,  were  not  Greek  at  all  and  could 
never  be  disguised  as  anything  but  what  they  were — 
barbarians. 

The  great  Empire  broke  up,  but  certain  things  re- 
mained. The  world  had  been  one,  actually  and  politi- 
cally, if  only  for  a  few  years.  That  of  itself  was  a  reve- 
lation, a  stimulus  to  thought,  a  challenge,  a  prophecy. 
The  unwieldy  unstable  kingdoms  that  succeeded  the 
Empire,  and  their  hideous  wars — wars  vulgar  for  the 
want  of  any  ground  higher  than  mere  personal  ambi- 
tions, and  waged  by  troops  with  as  little  principle  as  the 
kings  to  whom  they  were  bound  by  the  cash  nexus  alone 

6  Aristotle,  Politics,  i.  6,  p.   12553. 

6  Cf.    Herodotus,    v.    22,    on    the   claims   of    the   earlier    Alexander   and    his 
family  to  be  Greek.     Demosthenes  ranked  them  as  barbarians. 


204*  PROGRESS  IN  RELIGION 

— there  seemed  to  be  little  of  the  ideal  in  these.  Yet  ideal 
there  was,  vulgarised  for  the  moment,  but  an  echo  of 
the  great  idealist  himself,  and  again  a  prophecy;  the  unity 
of  the  world  underlay  all  these  confusions,  and  nerved 
the  vulgar  hope  of  each  mock  Alexander.7  It  was  no 
longer  in  Nature  that  East  and  West  should  be  separate. 
Our  modern  belief  in  the  mailed  fist,  in  efficiency  and 
the  survival  of  the  fittest,  is  not  after  all  quite  new. 
Nature,  as  sophists  and  soldiers  saw  her  then,  "red  in 
tooth  and  claw,"  shouted  aloud  that  the  world  was  one 
and  awaited  the  Conquerer.  "To  the  strongest,"  mur- 
mured the  dying  Alexander,8  when  his  guards  asked  what 
should  be  done  with  his  empire.  Nature  said  the  same, 
and  offered  the  strongest  One  World  for  his  own.  This 
drastic  expression  of  the  unity  of  all  existence  was  a 
lesson  which  humanity  could  not  fail  to  grasp,  however 
badly  the  dynasts  failed  to  achieve  their  purpose. 

To  pass  from  kings  to  commoners,  lowlier  men  but  not 
more  vulgar,  the  new  era  gave  them  a  world  with  bar- 
riers swept  away.  When  the  Roman  Empire  was  at  last 
established  after  three  centuries,  men  from  Plutarch  to 
Claudian  remarked  with  a  wonder,  which  perhaps  sur- 
prised us  in  the  days  before  the  war  with  its  submarines 
and  peace  with  its  passports,  that  all  the  lands  and  all  the 
seas  were  open  for  every  man.  Alexander  was  the  great 
opener  of  the  world.  Greeks  from  Antimenidas  to 
Herodotus  had  travelled  the  East  and  the  West;  but  in 
the  track  of  Alexander's  battalions  traders  and  settlers 
and  would-be  civil  servants  followed  in  swarms  to  the 
new  centres  to  which  trade  was  shifting.  To  be  an  exile 
was  a  tragic  thing  in  the  old  days,  bitterest  of  experi- 
ences; now  it  was  preferable  and  natural.  Then  the 

7  Compare  what  Polybius  (v.  102) :  says  of  Philip  V.  of  Macedon  in  217 
.c.:  "a  family  which  above  all  families  has  somehow  a  tendency  to  aim  at 
iniversal  monarchy";  also  v.  104. 


B.C 
un 

8  Arrian,    Anabasis,    vii.    26,    3. 


GREEK  WORLD  AFTER  ALEXANDER     205 

Greek  was  driven  out  of  his  city  by  violence;  now  he 
chose  to  go  and  live  at  Antioch  or  Babylon,  and  the  little 
provincial  town  among  the  hills  could  carry  on  its  high 
politics  without  him.  The  vulgar  Greek  had  found  out 
what  the  kings  had  learnt,  that  all  the  world  was  one. 
To  trade  or  to  fight  or  to  administer  at  the  foreigner's 
expense,  he  left  the  homeland  for  ever;  he  was  done  with 
the  parish,  he  chose  the  world. 

The  thoughtful  element  in  Greece  made  the  same  dis- 
covery. When  it  was  suggested  to  Socrates  that  he  might 
break  prison  and  live  in  Thessaly,  "What  would  one 
want  to  live  in  Thessaly  for  ?"  9  he  asked,  and  he  might 
well  ask.  Isocrates,  his  younger  contemporary,  makes  it 
abundantly  clear,  as  do  the  lives  of  the  philosophers,  that 
educated  people  preferred  one  city  to  all  others.  Educa- 
tion and  culture  drew  men  from  their  own  lands  to 
Athens,  as  art  draws  English  and  Americans  to  Italy, 
to  live  there.  Gradually  other  centres  sprang  up  which 
had  similar  attractions.  Alexandria  was  not  the  least  like 
Athens,  as  little  like  it  as  New  York  is  like  Oxford ;  but, 
as  in  our  modern  parallel,  it  was  not  hard  to  surmise  that 
a  man  of  culture  might  prefer  the  larger  place  and  have 
reason,  intelligible  enough,  for  his  choice.  Or  if  he  did 
not  care  for  Alexandria,  there  were  Antioch,  Rhodes,  and 
Pergamum,  and  further  afield  Seleucia  on  the  Euphrates. 

The  spread  of  Greeks  all  over  the  eastern  Mediter- 
ranean and  into  the  lands  of  Seleucus,  to  Babylonia  and 
to  Bactria,  produced  many  by-products.  To-day  in  India 
the  Indian  himself  will  wear  European  boots  and  trousers 
and  sun-helmet ;  he  will  have  a  European  house  in  a  hill- 
station  ;  he  will  send  his  son  to  England  to  be  educated ; 
he  may  remove  to  England  himself;  and  all  this  despite 
barriers  of  colour  and  creed  that  were  non-existent  in 
that  ancient  world.  It  is  not  the  product  of  government 

9  Cf.  Plato,  Crito,  53,  54. 


206  PROGRESS  IN  RELIGION 

policy;  it  is  the  result  of  continuity,  of  intercourse.  So 
in  that  ancient  world,  men  everywhere  learnt  Greek,  read 
Greek,  talked  Greek,  and  at  last  thought  Greek.  The 
Hellenisation  of  the  world  had  begun. 

The  Greek  spirit  made  its  way  into  the  strongholds 
of  what  we  may  call  the  old  world;  for  the  Greek  spirit 
is  always  new,  the  Greek  "ever  young,  a  child  in  soul," 
as  the  old  Egyptian  in  Plato's  story  said  to  Solon.  Bar- 
barians, as  Celsus  conceded  in  his  attack  on  Christianity, 
are  able  to  discover  religious  truth — religious  ideas,  we 
might  translate  it,  dogmata  is  his  word;  but  to  criticise 
and  to  establish  what  the  barbarians  have  discovered,  to 
develop  it  and  bring  it  to  bear  on  virtue  (the  Greek  arete 
is  hardly  translateable  in  any  of  our  modern  barbarian 
tongues) — the  Greeks,  he  held,  are  betier  at  that  task.10 
To  criticise,  to  compare,  to  judge — that  is  the  Greek 
gift;  the  foreigner  shall  amass  the  evidence,  the  Greek 
shall  sum  it  up  and  give  the  verdict.  All  was  confusion, 
says  the  Greek  philosopher  speaking  of  the  universe,  but 
Mind  came  and  made  a  cosmos  of  it.  So  the  Greek  was 
to  do  in  the  world  of  the  mind;  and  men  responded,  ob- 
stinately and  slowly,  but  under  the  irresistible  compulsion 
and  charm  of  higher  thought.  The  dynasts  made  the 
world  one;  they  abolished  the  old  ways  of  life,  city  and 
king  and  cult;  they  opened  new  trade  routes  to  bring  the 
nations  together;  and  the  Greek  came  and  made  the  whole 
intellectually  right,  and  therefore  first  tolerable  and  then 
natural.  The  man  who  thought  on  Greek  lines  had,  more 
emphatically  than  the  trader,  emerged  from  the  parish; 
he  lived  and  thought,  a  citizen  of  the  world.  The  eyes 
of  mankind  were  opened  and  they  had  a  new  spiritual 
justification  for  the  largest  life.  The  dialects  recede  in 
speech;  Attic  becomes  the  one  language  of  letters,  the 
language  of  government  used  by  the  Macedonian  kings, 

10  Celsus,  quoted  by  Origen,  adv.  Cehum,  i.  2. 


GREEK  WORLD  AFTER  ALEXANDER     207 

modified  inevitably; ai  and  in  the  world  of  thought  and 
spirit  it  is  the  same ;  the  rustic  is  shed,  the  local  discarded, 
and  men  of  all  origins  become  mutually  intelligible.  This 
is  no  slight  thing;  it  has  invariably  spiritual  consequences 
of  the  most  momentous.  The  international  exchange  of 
writers  and  thinkers  is  one  of  the  greatest  and  most  hope- 
ful factors  of  the  modern  world.  This  was  one  part  of 
Hellenisation.  In  the  ancient  world  it  took  another  form. 
Men  of  every  race  virtually  became  Greek ;  they  did  their 
thinking  in  Greek,  and  made  their  contributions  in  Greek. 
The  Greek  language  and  literature  became  a  sort  of 
clearing-house  of  ideas.  Man  became  "cosmopolitan" — 
the  word  was  newly  coined  by  Diogenes12 — they  were 
citizens  of  the  world;  and  it  has  been  shrewdly  noted  that 
the  world  as  a  rule  was  as  Greek  as  the  word.13 

It  is  never  an  easy  thing  to  make  out  the  pedigree  of 
an  idea.  The  collection  of  literary  parallels  is  a  begin- 
ner's game;  sometimes  it  tells  us  a  little,  but  as  often 
nothing.  Macrobius,  or  anybody  else  who  has  scissors, 
can  show  us  that  Virgil  read  Homer,  or  that  Milton  read 
Virgil,  or  both  Euripides.  But  quite  as  often,  or  more 
often,  the  great  influences  are  not  to  be  catalogued  in 
this  simple  way.  No  book  perhaps  has  had  more  in- 
fluence on  modern  thinking  than  Darwin's  Origin  of 
Species ;  that  influence  is  not  to  be  demonstrated  like  that 
of  Homer  upon  Virgil,  but  it  is  not  the  less  real.  If  Zeno 
the  Stoic  became  a  Greek,  and  one  of  the  greatest  forces  in 
Greek  thought,  his  first  lessons  in  thought  were  given  him 
by  Phoenician  mother  or  nurse;  and  however  effective 
a  man's  conversion  or  perversion  in  religion  or  race  may 
be,  it  is  never  complete;  his  sub-conscious  mind  never 
loses  its  earliest  acquisitions.  The  Semite  might  be  Hel- 

11  J.  H.  Moulton,  Grammar  of  New  Testament  Greek,  pp.  30  ff.,  on  the  rise 
of  the   "Common   Greek*   as  a  by-product  of  Alexander's  achievement,   in   the 
great  armies,  and  in  the  new  cities. 

12  Cf.   Diog.   Laert.,   vi.  63. 

13  Beloch,  (Jr.  Gesch.,  III.  i.  p.  412. 


208  PROGRESS  IN  RELIGION 

lenised  and  meet  the  Greek  on  equal  terms,  but  uncon- 
sciously his  Greek  friends  would  absorb  from  him  ideas 
not  primarily  Greek — not  inconsistent  perhaps  with  their 
Greek  training  and  Greek  ideas,  but  not  of  the  original 
stock.  Intermarriage  invariably  blends  types  of  minds 
as  it  does  types  of  race;  he  is  a  father  of  strong  character 
whose  children  are  not  more  moulded  by  their  mother. 
Even  foreign  servants,  as  English  parents  in  India  know, 
can  do  almost  as  much;  sometimes  it  might  be  truer  to 
say  they  do  more.  The  Macedonians,  says  Livy,  degen- 
erated into  Syrians,  Parthians,  and  Egyptians.14  If  men 
did  not  speak  then  as  now  of  Levantines,  none  the  less 
Levantines  there  were.  There  were  half-castes  long  be- 
fore Alexander's  experiment  in  international  intermar- 
riage. Antisthenes  the  Cynic  was  said  to  be  the  son  of  a 
Thracian  woman — i.e.  a  foreigner  and  a  slave-woman. 
Birth,  adoption,  migration,  reading,  and,  as  ever,  talk, 
were  factors  making  for  a  new  world.  These  are  forces 
ever  with  us. 

But  in  that  world  more  than  these  permanent  and  natu- 
ral factors  were  at  work.  The  kings  were  Greek,  or  suf- 
ficiently Greek  to  be  conscious  that  they  must  be  quite 
Greek,  must  make  good  any  gaps  in  their  qualifications. 
The  simplest  way  was  to  emphasise  Greek  culture ;  to  be 
missionaries  of  Hellenism.  Ptolemy  Soter  founded  the 
Museum  in  Alexandria,  a  library,  a  place  of  study,  a 
University — if  the  word  may  shed  enough  of  its  Latin 
origin  to  suggest  studies  and  students  with  a  minimum  of 
organisation,  learning  without  examinations  and  degrees, 
but  not  without  disorder  and  other  diversions;; — 

The  due  vicissitudes  of  rest  and  toil. 

The  example  was,  more  or  less,  followed  by  the  Seleucids 
at  Antioch  and  by  the  Attalids  at  Pergamum — by  both 

14  Livy,  xxxviii.  1 7. 


GREEK  WORLD  AFTER  ALEXANDER     209 

with  very  conspicuous  results.  Schools  sprang  up  or 
were  founded  elsewhere;  sophists  or  lecturers  travelled 
everywhere,  and  taught  and  lectured  as  they  went.  Books 
were  cheaper 1C  and  were  multiplied.  Politics  there  were 
none,  and  patriotism  was  difficult;  to  what  could  a  man 
be  loyal?  The  last  of  the  Attalids  bequeathed  his  king- 
dom to  Rome,  probably  the  best  thing  for  the  kingdom 
in  such  times,  a  kingdom  without  race  or  nationality, 
without  a  past,  and  without  self-government.  Men  who 
wished  to  live  were  driven  to  thought  or  to  art. 

For  thought  the  world  was  in  many  ways  better 
equipped  than  ever  before.  Men  had  not  indeed  the  po- 
litical sense,  which  only  personal  experience  of  politics 
can  give;  but  the  training  of  the  old  days  was  not  all 
lost.  To  it  was  added  the  consciousness  of  a  larger 
world,  of  a  great  expansion  of 'experience,  of  the  value 
of  the  contributions  of  other  races  and  other  times.  There 
was  Geography,  there  was  natural  science,  there  was  the 
great  brotherhood  of  the  human  race,  never  so  fully 
realised,  so  painfully  or  so  gladly.  Above  all,  everything 
was  reduced  at  last  to  a  common  denominator,  if  we  may 
so  put  it;  it  was  possible  to  compare  things  at  last,  which 
could  not  before  have  been  brought  together.  And  the 
man  who  was  to  do  the  thinking  had  a  new  standpoint. 
Athens  would  have  none  of  Anaxagoras ;  it  gave  Socrates 
the  hemlock;  that  was  how  the  most  cultivated  and  de- 
veloped community  of  antiquity  stood  towards  the  philo- 
sopher's position,  how  it  regarded  "the  contemplation  of 
all  time  and  all  existence."  By  now  all  that  was  gone; 
the  thinker  was  set  free — free  as  the  mercenary  soldier 
to  voyage  where  he  would,  and  battle  as  he  pleased,  in 
the  realms  of  thought;  and  the  religious  was  as  free.  It 
was  no  matter  of  choice;  the  freedom  was  forced  on  men 
by  the  kings  who  blotted  out  the  past  and  made  nothing 

is  Cheap,   and  inaccurately  transcribed;   cf.   Strabo,  xiii.    i,   55, 


210  PROGRESS  IN  RELIGION 

of  frontiers  old  or  new.  The  very  chaos  of  the  world 
and  of  Society  made  reconstruction  easier  and  more  in- 
evitable. The  comfortable  systems  were  gone,  so  far 
as  they  had  ever  existed.  The  thinker  had  to  start  again, 
with  a  new  freedom  and  a  wealth  of  material  that  might 
be  stimulating  or  might  paralyse. 

He  must  start  as  an  individual  face  to  face  with  the 
universe;  and  there  lies  the  key  to  most  of  the  thought 
of  the  period.  The  universe  is  the  most  splendid  of  so- 
cieties, but  compared  with  Athens  or  even  with  Phlius 
it  is  a  dull  club;  it  is  impossible  to  know  the  members, 
and  there  is  no  blackballing;  it  is  like  a  university  with- 
out colleges.  The  best  a  man  could  do  was  to  pick  up 
with  whom  he  could,  as  one  does  on  ship-board;  and,  as 
on  ship-board,  the  antipathies  are  dulled.  You  sit  next 
a  foreigner,  but  it  is  not  for  long,  and  by  and  by  the 
courtesies  of  the  table  open  your  minds ;  so  in  that  world 
there  was  no  longer  any  sense  in  race-feuds,  and  very 
little  in  any  feuds  at  all.  If  the  ties  that  bound  a  man  to 
his  neighbours  were  all  loosed,  the  barriers  that  kept  him 
from  his  enemies  were  broken.  Theban,  Athenian,  and 
Corinthian,  how  they  had  warred  in  the  past ! "  Now 
they  lived  in  the  same  king's  camp  as  their  grandfathers 
had  in  Xenophon's  in  perhaps  the  same  regions;  they 
traded  on  the  same  quays  in  the  Nile  or  the  Euphrates; 
and  among  barbarians  the  old  stories  grew  dim  and  the 
race-hatreds  with  them.  Courtesy,  kindness,  the  good 
turn  received  and  repaid — they  were  nothing,  the  mere 
decencies  of  ship-board;  but,  being  nothing,  they  came 
to  be  something — the  expression,  half  conscious,  of  a 
new  sense  of  common  humanity.  So  the  solitary  thinker 
brought  to  his  task  of  the  reconstruction  of  the  universe 
an  unconsidered  equipment  of  new  human  feelings,  the 
more  potent  for  being  half -conscious,  natural,  and  not 

16  Cf.   p.    210. 


GREEK  WORLD  AFTER  ALEXANDER     211 

based  on  a  view  of  life  or  a  philosophy ;  and  in  time  they 
passed  into  his  philosophy  and  contributed  to  it  more 
than  might  have  been  expected.  It  was  easier  for  the 
Stoic  to  reach  and  to  teach  his  dogma  of  our  common  hu- 
manity, when  he  and  we  had  fallen  into  the  way  of 
recognising  it  by  instinct,  without  the  horrible  disturb- 
ance that  the  old  hatreds  of  neighbour  cities  had  once 
made. 

There,  then,  is  the  new  world,  larger,  vaster,  stranger 
than  the  old;  traditions  broken,  the  future  uncertain; 
but  the  human  soul  as  ever  gaining  something  out  of 
loss,  finding  freedom  and  friendship  in  chaos,  and  bravely 
setting  about  a  permanent  home  for  itself  where  all  was 
fugitive.  For  those  whose  theme  is  progress  in  religion, 
there  could  hardly  be  a  more  promising  field.  It  is  when 
an  old  world  breaks  up  past  repair,  that  it  is  possible  for 
new  truth  to  inspire  souls  set  free  to  divine  a  new  cosmos 
and  a  larger  God  behind  it. 

The  re-thinking  of  God  in  the  age  after  Alexander 
was,  as  it  always  is,  conditioned  by  the  dominant  thoughts 
and  experiences  of  the  time.  The  movement  of  thought, 
when  it  does  move,  has  always  been  towards  unity  and 
personality  in  God,  to  a  heightening  of  the  emphasis  on 
man's  personality,  to  a  demand  for  justice  in  the  relations 
of  God  and  man,  for  righteousness  in  the  Universe. 
Greek  thought  in  the  great  old  days  had  been  more  apt 
to  recognise  the  unity  than  the  personality  of  God.  The 
Greek  had  been  conscious  of  law  and  of  mind  in  the  uni- 
verse, and  polytheism  was  already  some  generations  be- 
fore Alexander  losing  its  hold  upon  thinkers;  though 
there  were  still  now  and  then  reminders  that  Athens  had 
its  national  gods  and  counted  it  important  that  the  edu- 
cation of  youth  should  include  them,  that  people  perhaps 
still  believed  that  those  gods  made  national  prosperity 
depend  upon  national  piety.  But  Alexander,  it  would 


212  PROGRESS  IN  RELIGION 

seem,  had  declared  to  all  men  that  the  local  gods  of 
Athens  were  politically  negligible.  Not  that  he  said  so, 
or  even  thought  so,  any  more  than  Athens  perhaps  had 
felt  about  the  gods  of  Melos  eighty  years  before;  but 
his  career  gave  men  new  conceptions  of  the  physical 
world  and  new  knowledge  of  the  ideas  of  other  men, 
and  the  result  was  a  decline  of  interest  in  the  gods  of 
the  city  state. 

Men  would  seem  to  have  reflected  that  these  gods  had 
never  been  of  much  account  outside  their  little  frontiers, 
and  the  world  was  very  wide  indeed,  very  much  larger 
than  one  could  associate  with  those  gods.  If  one  can 
imagine  how  an  English  villager,  who  migrated  to  the 
New  World  and  became  a  millionaire,  might  feel  toward 
the  squire  and  parson  of  the  parish  where  he  grew  up, 
the  analogy  may  help  us.  There  the  squire  is  with  his 
old  acres,  the  parson  with  his  little  school,  laying  down 
the  law  and  receiving  local  homage  as  of  old ;  the  return- 
ing emigrant  may  find  them  absurd  or  pleasant  as  may  be, 
but  he  will  certainly  feel  them  to  be  narrow  and  trivial 
in  outlook  and  sympathy,  unrelated  with  the  new  large 
world  he  knows,  and  unintelligent  of  his  own  experience 
— his  inferiors,  in  short,  unless  they  have  special  grace. 
This  special  grace  the  old  gods  of  the  city  state  had  not. 
Their  statues  had  it,  because  a  sculptor  of  note  made 
them— "a  sculptor  who,"  the  returning  soldier  of  fortune 
reflected,  "will  make  my  statue  one  of  these  days,"  and 
who  probably  did  it  better,  finding  portraiture  more  con- 
genial than  creation.  What  made  the  gods  more  absurd 
was  the  practice  that  flourished  in  the  third  century  and 
onward,  of  deifying  adventurer  princes — Demetrius  is 
the  great  classical  example,  a  god  of  very  present  help 
in  trouble,  as  the  famous  Athenian  hymn17  said  about 
him,  bluntly  adding  that  the  other  gods  were  of  little 

17  Quoted  in  Athenaeus,  vi.  p.  253. 


GREEK  WORLD  AFTER  ALEXANDER    213 

use;  they  either  did  not  exist  or  did  not  attend  to  men; 
Demetrius  was  not  stone  nor  wood,  but  real.  There  are 
more  points  of  view  than  one  from  which  these  deifica- 
tions may  be  considered;  there  is  a  philosophic  defence 
of  them  which  we  shall  have  to  consider  later  on;  but 
to  any  one  who  knew  Demetrius  personally  the  hymn  and 
the  consecration  made  both  the  Athenians  and  their  gods 
absurd.  None  the  less,  like  the  squire  in  the  parish,  the 
local  gods  maintained  themselves  in  their  own  homes,  as 
is  proved  by  coinage  and  dedication. 

The  real  gods  must  in  any  case  be  beings  more  really 
related  to  the  world  men  know;  a  god  like  the  squire  of 
the  old  village  does  not  fit  with  the  new  world  that  Alex- 
ander rules.  Alexander  is  better,  or  even  Demetrius,  as 
the  Athenians  said.  But  Demetrius  would  not  do.  The 
real  gods  must  have  range  of  mind,  and  actual  power, 
beyond  even  Alexander's.  And  gods,  or  more  often  god- 
desses, were  found,  as  we  shall  see,  whose  sway  outran 
and  outlasted  the  great  king's — gods  of  life  and  death, 
goddesses  of  birth  and  re-birth,  of  this  world  and  the 
world  beyond.  Simultaneously,  another  disaster  befel 
the  old  gods ;  the  deification  of  army  leaders  inspired  the 
suggestion  that  they  too  like  Demetrius  had  originally 
been  men  and  women.  Euhemerism  discredited  the  old 
gods;  but  it  did  not  touch  the  deities  who  give  life  and 
who  rule  death,  and  the  sole  defence  for  the  old  gods  be- 
came the  plea  that  they  are  subordinates  of  these  greater 
gods,  or,  better  still,  that  perhaps  they  are  the  greater 
gods,  named  or  mis-named  in  each  locality.  They  began 
gradually  to  lose  their  personality  as  the  many  Zeus-es 
of  the  days  before  Homer  became  fused,  as  we  saw,  in 
the  Homeric  father  of  gods  and  men. 

The  new  gods,  however  gracefully  accommodated  in 
the  Greek  pantheon,  were  patently  of  foreign  origin.  It 
could  never  be  obscured  that  Isis  belonged  to  Egypt  and 


214.  PROGRESS  IN  RELIGION 

Cybele  to  Phrygia.  But  somehow  they  had  the  power, 
that  Greek  gods  and  goddesses* lacked,  of  extending  their 
frontiers  with  a  sweep  like  Alexander's.  If  the  gods  of 
the  Greeks  imposed  their  names  on  those  of  the  Romans, 
it  was  for  literary  purposes  chiefly;  but  with  Isis  and 
Cybele  it  was  quite  different.  They  gradually  captured 
the  world  and  held  it  long.  The  barbarians,  it  would  ap- 
pear, really  were  better  at  discovering  religious  beliefs, 
at  discovering  gods.  But  the  Greeks  brought  their  minds 
to  bear  on  the  gods  and  goddesses  so  discovered,  and  gave 
a  rather  different  explanation  of  them.  They  became 
functions  of  something  else,  more  divine  or  less  divine  as 
one  chose  to  regard  it,  but  probably  less  personal  if  more 
powerful.  But  what  it  was,  was  a  problem  not  easily 
solved. 

There  were  two  sets  of  phenomena  to  explain,  even  if 
one  did  combine  them  and  call  the  compound,  the  to- 
tality of  all  experience,  the  underlying  reality,  Nature. 
The  word  was  by  now  an  old  one,  long  used  by  the  Soph- 
ists, and  to  be  used  again  and  with  more  grandeur  by 
the  Stoics.  But  the  explanation  men  give  of  gods  and 
laws  and  experience  often  needs  itself  to  be  explained; 
and  how  was  one  to  reconcile  the  facts  of  Law  and  the 
facts  of  Lawlessness?  The  beautiful  cantos  of  Spenser's 
incomplete  seventh  book  of  the  Faerie  Queene  remind  us 
of  the  difficulty  of  Mutabilitie  in  a  Universe  of  Law.  Let 
us  look  at  what  the  citizen  of  the  world  found. 

He  found,  as  his  great-grandfather  had  found,  a  world 
ruled  by  law — generation,  growth  and  death,  controlled 
by  laws  whose  action  could  be  observed,  even  if  their 
causes  were  hard  to  divine.  Summer  and  winter,  seed- 
time and  harvest — all  seemed  fixed  by  law.  We  know  the 
effect  of  scientific  research  and  scientific  theory  in  the 
nineteenth  century,  and  we  can  appreciate  that  Reign  of 
Law  (I  borrow  the  phrase  from  the  title  of  a  book  now 


GREEK  WORLD  AFTER  ALEXANDER     215 

forgotten)  which  the  ancients  observed,  not  indeed  over 
so  wide  a  sphere  as  our  fathers,  but  over  one  wide  enough 
to  stimulate  thought  and  to  suggest  tempting  generalisa- 
tions. But  what  has  happened  in  our  own  day  befel  also 
in  the  era  of  the  Macedonian  kings.  What  Biology  has 
done  of  late  years,  Astronomy  did  then;  it  gave  a  height- 
ening to  the  idea  of  Law,  and  weight  to  the  conception  of 
the  unity  of  the  universe.  Whether  the  stars,  as  some 
people  began  to  say  under  Eastern  influence,  were  gods, 
or  were  brute  matter  controlled  by  Necessity,  that  vague 
term  which  served  Greece  for  our  Natural  Law — was  it 
not  possible  in  a  world,  which  certainly  appeared  to  be 
one,  which  might,  not  inconceivably,  be  a  living  being  it- 
self, that  the  various  parts  of  that  world  were  members 
one  of  another,  that  not  merely  crops  and  blights,  and  pos- 
sibly the  tides  of  those  larger  seas  about  the  world's  outer 
edges,  were  ruled  and  given  their  seasons  by  the  heavenly 
bodies,  but  that  the  lives  and  destinies  of  men  also  were 
controlled  and  shaped  by  those  "bright  rulers,  gleaming 
in  aether,  bringers  of  summer  and  winter  to  men"?18 
After  all  that  the  philosophers  had  said  of  Mind  in  man, 
it  was  clear  there  was  Mind  of  some  sort  beyond  him; 
was  his  mind,  was  he,  independent  of  the  greater  Mind  ? 
Was  that  thinkable?  So  the  steps  were  taken  that  led 
men  to  the  conception  of  Fate — Heimarmene,  that  abso- 
lute inevitable  control  of  all  things  by  the  power  that 
wheels  the  stars,  we  should  say  and  expect  them  to  say, 
but  many  of  them  said  "by  the  stars"  and  left  it  there. 
The  emphasis  on  the  unity  of  the  universe  can  hardly 
go  much  further. 

But  there  were  other  phenomena  which  it  was  hard  to 
reduce  to  law,  hard  to  make  intelligible  to  reason  at  all, 
hard  to  find  any  sense  in  whatever.  To  many  the  col- 
lapse of  the  old  order  was  a  mystery  with  no  solution, 

18  Aeschylus,  Agam.  5,  6. 


216  PROGRESS  IN  RELIGION 

beyond  solution,  and  it  had  all  turned  on  the  accident  of 
Philip  having  a  son  of  genius,  or  (a  more  desperate 
thought)  on  the  accident  of  Alexander  having  an  incred- 
ible run  of  luck.  Four  hundred  years  later  Greece  was 
still  capable  of  debating  whether  Alexander  owed  his 
greatness  to  genius  (arete)  or  to  luck.  In  312  B.C.  Se- 
leucus  was  a  beggar  at  the  court  of  Ptolemy;  next  year 
he  was  King  of  the  East.  Thirty  years  later  he  defeated 
Ptolemy  Ceraunus  in  battle,  took  him  prisoner,  forgave 
him  for  his  father's  sake,  and  was  murdered  by  him. 
"The  Queen  is  dead ;  how  fortune  does  banter  us !"  The 
ejaculation  of  the  English  eighteenth  century  gives  the 
only  clue  that  some  could  find  to  the  history  of  Alex- 
ander's successors  and  their  sons.  Luck  made  a  man 
king,  luck  saved  a  crown,  luck  established  a  dynasty; 
and  luck  became  a  candidate  for  the  throne  of  the  Uni- 
verse. Tyche  was  no  new  word  in  Greece,  but  now  it 
gained  new  significance;  Tyche  ruled  the  world,  prince 
and  beggar.19  Men  lost  faith  in  order;  things  happened, 
whatever  a  man  might  plan,  however  he  might  work; 
virtue,  vice,  wisdom,  folly  were  irrelevant;  all  was  freak 
and  whim,  or  if  that  imply  some  sort  of  personality  be- 
hind phenomena,  all  was  pure  fluke,  like  the  falling  of 
dice.  As  Menander  said,  fluke  was  God: — 

TdUTOttaTOV  COTIV  to?  fOlKf  7TOV  0£O«. 

If  the  stars  are  ruled  by  Law,  and  all  human  affairs 
by  Chance,  what  can  be  made  of  life?    The  riddle  was 

19  Cf.  Tte  story  which  Polybius  (viii.  22)  tells  of  the  tears  of  Antiochus  when 
Archaeus  was  brought  before  him  in  chains  and  he  saw  TO  Sva<l>v\aierov  KO.I 
irapaAoyov  T<av  in  TIJS  T"xfa  <rufta.iv6vr<av ;  cf.  Bevan,  House  of  Helectts,  ii. 
pp.  5-13.  See  also  the  comment  of  Demetrius  of  Phalerutn  (Polybius,  xxix,  21) 
on  fortune's  freaks  in  fi.fty  years,  the  fall  of  the  Persians,  the  rise  of  the 
Macedonians,  and  Fortune  still  uncertain  what  to  do  with  them.  One  may 
recall  the  lines  quoted,  it  is  said,  by  Brutus  before  he  killed  himself  at  Phihppi 
(Dio  Cassius,  Ixvii.  49) : 

So    rkriiJLOV    aperi;,   Adyos   op'    fi<r8',    tyui    Se   art 
is    epyov    ri<TKOVV '     <ru   &'    ap*    eSouAeuej   TVX.TI- 


GREEK  WORLD  AFTER  ALEXANDER     217 

insoluble,  and  the  only  outcome  of  attempting  to  solve 
it  was  despair.  There  was  a  painter,  says  Sextus  Em- 
piricus,20  who  tried  again  and  again  to  paint  the  foam 
on  a  horse's  mouth;  he  lost  his  temper  at  last,  and  in 
anger  threw  his  sponge  at  his  picture;  the  sponge  hit 
the  mouth  of  the  horse,  and  produced  the  foam  that  skill 
could  not  achieve ;  so  with  the  thinker — he  thought  hard, 
wrestled  with  the  problem  in  vain,  and  then  he  too  (as 
we  say)  threw  up  the  sponge,  and  found  peace  in  so 
doing.  So  came  the  Sceptic. 

But  scepticism  is  not  a  working  basis  of  life;  a  man 
cannot  maintain  a  family  on  scepticism.  Faith  and  hope 
are  the  foundations  of  the  family,  and  they  are  laid  by 
love,  unconscious  of  its  great  spiritual  venture  in  laying 
them.  Men  felt  there  must  be  some  reality  somewhere, 
or  something  that  would  serve  for  reality;  but  everything 
broke  down  that  a  man  touched;  thought  failed  to  solve 
the  problem  of  man's  life  and  the  problem  of  the  universe; 
righteousness  did  not  achieve  reward  in  comfort  or  in 
happiness;  trade  and  business  were  wrecked  at  any  mo- 
ment by  the  meaningless  war  of  some  foolish  greedy 
despot;  the  human  mind  was  reduced  to  desperation. 
There  were  the  children;  what  was  to  become  of  them? 
If  the  physician  could  not  hit  the  cure  for  their  ailments, 
perhaps  the  quack  could ;  or  the  old  barbarian  nurse  who 
loved  them  might  remember  something  her  people  far 
away  had  practised.  If  the  gods  of  Greece  had  collapsed, 
if  the  philosophers  were  reduced  to  throwing  up  the 
sponge — well,  in  this  world,  where  we  are  learning  that 
there  are  other  people  besides  the  Greeks,  perhaps  some 
of  the  barbarians  know  of  gods  or  daemons,  something 
or  other  effectual,  that,  if  not  final,  will  tide  us  over  the 
interim.  The  interim  was  the  urgent  problem;  the  mys- 
teries of  the  universe  and  their  eventual  solution  could 

20  Sextus  Empricus,  adv.  Mothemotieos, 


218  PROGRESS  IN  RELIGION 

wait.  Isis  and  Cybele  may  be  eventually  as  fugitive  as 
Alexander  or  Demetrius,  things  of  a  longer  day,  but 
ephemeral  too;  well,  our  day  is  shorter,  and  they  may 
avail  to  help  us  and  our  children.  Melancholy  and  de- 
pressing as  is  this  all-round  despair,  there  is  in  it  still 
a  heightening  of  love,  a  keener  sense  of  individual  needs. 
The  state  was  gone,  the  race  was  going;  Alexander  had 
swept  the  state  away,  the  races  were  being  merged  in 
one  another,  for  if  he  too  was  gone,  his  work  went  on — 
still  the  family  remained,  and  the  ego  found  a  new  inter- 
est in  it,  where  it  could  face  the  venture.  There  were 
indeed  many  who  would  not  take  the  risk;  the  philos- 
ophers generally  did  without  children,  and  common  peo- 
ple of  means  began  to  limit  their  numbers;  and  race- 
suicide  did  not  go  unrecognised.21  Still,  where  men 
dared  to  live,  where  the  venture  of  the  family  was  made, 
some  attempt  must  be  made  for  what  Plato  called  a 
"raft"  to  take  men  over  the  sea  of  life.  Gods  of  some 
sort  seemed  the  obvious  solution;  and  if  philosophy  will 
not  support  us  in  our  new  alliances,  well,  philosophy  has 
nothing  to  offer  us,  and  facts  of  a  sort,  facts  however 
temporary,  "rafts"  however  precarious,  are  better  than 
instant  drowning. 

To  sum  up,  the  new  age  found  the  problem  of  God 
immensely  hard.  All  the  facts  of  experience  pointed  to 
the  unity  of  the  universe;  that  received  more  and  more 
emphasis.  But  Law  and  Chance  disputed  the  throne, 
both  impersonal  in  themselves,  both  enemies  of  human 
personality.  Once  more  pain  and  bereavement  were  em- 
phasising personality.  The  world  baulked  it  and  mocked 
it,  and  men  began  to  look  beyond  the  world  for  right- 
eousness. There  could  be  no  restoration  of  nerve  till 
mankind  was  off  the  waters  of  uncertainty,  free  of  the 
quicksands,  the  rocks,  the  incalculable  tempests.  The 

21  See  p.  263. 


GREEK  WORLD  AFTER  ALEXANDER     219 

problem  was  certainty.  Men  craved,  as  ever,  a  divine 
personality ;  they  felt  that  their  own  personality  was  real, 
or  ought  to  be  real;  they  demanded  fair  play  of  the  uni- 
verse. So  much  emerges  from  the  actions  and  reactions 
of  thought  and  religion  and  scepticism  in  this  strange 
period.  To  trace  more  fully  some  of  these  movements 
as  they  illustrate  our  subject  of  Progress  in  Religion  is 
the  task  before  us. 


X 

THE  STOICS 

IT  has  been  remarked  that  none  of  the  great  Stoics  was 
a  native  of  Greece  proper.  Zeno  was  a  Semite — "with 
no  Greek  charm  about  him,"  it  has  been  added,  and  un- 
,.  able  to  write  Attic  Greek.1  Stoicism,  to  look  Westward, 
'  was  of  all  Greek  philosophies  that  which  most  appealed 
I  to  the  more  serious  Roman  mind.  But,  whatever  its 
antecedents  and  whoever  its  followers,  it  was  intensely 
Greek.  The  East,  the  West,  and  the  influence  of  Greek- 
it  sums  up  the  new  world  in  Which  Stoicism  grew;  and 
in  many  other  ways  Stoicism  shows  in  its  very  texture  the 
milieu  and  the  date  of  its  origin.  It  is  a  curious  coinci- 
dence, too,  that  with  the  coming  of  the  Northern  peoples, 
Who  were  to  break  up  that  society  of  the  world  in  which 
Stoicism  began,  the  last  great  Stoic  name  is  written  in 
history.  Alexander  abolished  the  nations,  the  Germans 
brought  them  back,  and  in  the  interval  flourished  this 
great  system  of  Cosmopolitanism,  humanitarianism,  and 
pantheism — and,  we  may  add,  of  rationalism;  for  no 
body  of  teaching,  at  least  before  the  advent  of  modern 
physical  science,  has  perhaps  ever  had  so  strong  an  in- 
fluence, and  made  so  great  an  impact  on  mankind,  with 
so  little  of  the  romantic  and  so  little  of  the  religious. 

The  general  teaching  of  Stoicism  is  so  familiar,  it  has 
been  handled  so  often,  and  so  ably  by  modern  English 
writers,  that  it  will  not  be  necessary  for  us  to  survey  the 

1  Beloch,  Griech.  Gesch.,  III.  i.  466;  ohne  alle  hellenische  Anmuth.  Cf. 
Edwyn  Bevan,  Stoics  and  Sceptics,  17,  on  "an  Asiatic  darkness  of  skin,  a  long, 
straggling,  ungainly  body,"  and  bis  gaunt  bluntness  in  speech  and  life;  fol- 
lowing Diogenes  Laertius.  vii.  16. 

220 


THE  STOICS  221 

whole  of  it.  We  may  pause  to  remark  this  modern  ap- 
peal of  Stoicism,  for  it  will  do  something  to  explain  its 
rise  and  its  influence  in  antiquity;  and  then  it  will  suffice 
to  consider  in  turn  the  bearing  of  Stoic  thought  upon 
the  four  lines  along  which  we  have  been  tracing  the 
progress  of  religion,  and  the  evidence  given  by  the  for- 
tunes of  the  system  to  the  validity  of  our  deductions. 

First,  then,  a  few  words  on  the  modern  revival  of 
Stoicism.  Renan  said  that  Marcus  Aurelius  is  the  saint 
and  exemplar  of  Agnosticism.  The  very  word  Agnostic 
is  a  nineteenth-century  coinage;  and,  if  popular  use  iden- 
tifies it  with  Sceptic,  that  was  not  Huxley's  intention 
when  he  launched  the  word.  Nor,  one  may  add,  was  it 
the  idea  of  the  ancient  inventors  of  the  term  Sceptic  that 
it  should  imply  the  dogmatism  of  the  closed  book,  the 
affair  judged,  the  case  dismissed.  Agnostic  and  Sceptic 
by  first  intention  do  mean  the  same  thing,  so  that  for 
once  popular  usage  is  perhaps  justified.  Stoicism  rose 
in  an  age  of  uncertainty  and  flourished  again  in  the  nine- 
teenth century,  naturally  and  properly.  Its  fixed  points 
appealed  to  the  better  minds  of  the  nineteenth  century; 
its  great  principle  of  reference  to  Nature,  its  instinct, 
as  great  and  as  sound,  that  duty  must  be  somehow  real — 
these  are  the  cardinal  points  both  for  its  earlier  and  for 
its  later  floruit;  and  its  failure  in  either  period  sheds 
light  on  the  other. 

Stoicism  was  the  offspring  of  Cynicism.  The  long 
debate  of  the  Sophists  about  Nature  and  Convention, 
the  many  battles  whose  echoes  we  find  in  Plato's  dia- 
logues, produced  their  inevitable  effect  in  the  fourth  cen- 
tury B.C.  There  can  hardly  be  a  more  splendid  defence 
of  the  idea  of  a  state  than  in  the  Funeral  Speech  of  Per- 
icles, which  Thucydides  records,  not  without  traces  of  his 
own  mind  and  hand.  Fifteen  years  later  Euripides  wrote 
his  Trojan  Women,  which  won  no  prize  from  the  Athen- 


222  PROGRESS  IN  RELIGION 

ian  people,  which  he  could  not  have  expected  to  win  a 
prize.  The  will-to-power  of  Nietzsche  was  already  fa- 
miliar to  thinking  Athenians,  the  survival  of  the  phys- 
ically fittest  in  the  horrible  Melian  dialogue  in  Thucyd- 
ides.  Euripides  showed  in  his  Trojan  Women  that 
there  is  something  just  as  sacred  as  the  so-called  state; 
that  the  state  may  be  a  lie  against  humanity;  or,  if 
that  is  too  abstract,  that,  if  a  state  kills  my  son  and 
starves  my  wife  and  daughter  for  an  abstract  idea  like 
power,  or  even  equality,  or  for  the  squalid  ambition  of 
the  merchant  to  capture  another  huckster's  trade,  that 
state  is  a  lie,  and  shall  end.  The  Peloponnesian  war 
wrote  the  doom  of  the  particular  variety  of  that  type 
of  state  which  the  ancient  world  knew;  and  Alexander 
fulfilled  it.  The  sixty-seven  miserable  years  between  the 
end  of  the  Peloponnesian  war  and  the  accession  of  Alex- 
ander showed  that  the  ancient  state  had  ceased  to  be  real ; 
it  lasted  on,  struggling  to  seem  real;  but  it  was  a  sur- 
vival, a  simulacrum,  an  anachronism  that  warred  against 
life.2 

The  great  philosophers  saw  clearly  that  the  state  needed 
a  new  justification.  The  ideals  of  "the  man  in  the  street," 
which  the  Cleons  and  their  modern  equivalents  grasp  so 
well  and  utter  with  all  needed  blatancy,  do  not  justify  a 
state.  Plato  sketched  a  state  on  a  new  basis,  in  bitter 
revolt  against  "man-in-the-street"  democracy  3 — a  state 
with  a  coherent  aim,  with  a  central  idea.  Other  philos- 
ophers, and  some  very  unlikely  ones,  wrote  their  Re- 
publics too.  These  were  all  visionary,  but  they  all  point 
to  one  thing :  the  state  as  men  knew  it  was  an  anachron- 
ism, impossible  and  undesirable.  It  was  reserved  for  the 
thinnest  and  poorest  nature  of  them  all,  as  sometimes 
happens,  to  forecast  the  actual  future,  absurd  and  un- 

2  Cf.   Polybius'   stories  of  the   Spartan,   Aetolian  and   other  wars  of  the  cen- 
tury before  him. 

3  See  Plato,  Rep.,  viii.  557-562,  on  the  democratic  man. 


THE  STOICS  223 

practical  as  all  sensible  men  must  have  realised  him  to  be. 
Isocrates  saw  at  last  that  Macedon  must  be  the  Prussia 
to  unite  Greece  and  rule  the  world.  Philip  achieved  this, 
but  achievement  is  not  always  justification.  The  Cynic 
was  as  little  moved  by  the  success  of  Philip  as  by  that 
of  Pericles;  all  he  wanted  of  Alexander,  according  to  the 
story,  was  that  the  Macedonian  would  stand  out  of  the 
sunshine.  There  was  the  issue  nakedly  enough;  Alex- 
ander, empire,  Hellenisation,  the  "marriage  of  Europe 
and  Asia"  on  the  one  hand — Diogenes  and  the  sunshine 
on  the  other.  It  was  more  crudely  put,  more  adapted  for 
the  intelligence  of  the  meanest  intellect,  the  antithesis  of 
the  Trojan  Women;  Menelaus,  victory,  glory,  national 
efficiency  and  the  vengeance  which  the  vulgar  call  jus- 
tice— or  Hecuba  and  the  natural  relations  of  wife  and 
son.  Diogenes  for  the  time  impressed  men  as  the  Trojan 
Women  had  not. 

Antisthenes,  the  first  of  the  Cynic  school,  was,  as  we 
saw,  the  bastard  son  of  a  Thracian  slave-woman.  Well, 
if  he  was,  he  said,  many  of  the  great  in  Greek  legend 
came  from  abroad;  and  the  Athenians,  if  they  were  the 
children  of  the  soil,  shared  that  origin  with  the  insects. 
He  was  human;  he  had  character;  and  he  was  a  pupil 
of  Socrates,  he  would  define  his  terms,  know  what  he 
meant  and  get  back  to  the  real.  From  one  point  of  view, 
there  is  nothing  more  real  than  the  actual  man.  Thracian 
or  Greek  is  a  trivial  distinction ;  slave  or  free  is  accident, 
accident  in  the  philosophic  sense,  accident  in  the  popular 
sense.  So  Antisthenes  anticipated  the  Stoic  insistence 
on  the  common  humanity  of  all  men,  of  all  ranks,  of 
both  sexes.  Diogenes  went  further.  A  curious  mixture 
of  charlatan,  or  at  least  advertiser,  and  genuine  thinker, 
he  had,  like  a  popular  preacher  of  to-day,  the  gift  of  get- 
ting his  idea,  generally  a  simple  one,  into  the  intelligence 
of  everybody.  The  idea  might  be  repugnant  to  common 


224  PROGRESS  IN  RELIGION 

notions  of  decency  or  of  religion;  he  took  pains  to  say 
things  about  marriage,  to  do,  or  to  suggest  the  doing  of, 
acts  in  holy  precincts  that  were  taboo;  and  his  audacity, 
his  studied  absurdity,  suggested  the  train  of  thought 
which  he  meant  to  start.  The  Stoic  was  less  bizarre;  he 
was  more  sober,  and  a  good  deal  less  amusing;  his  para- 
doxes were  heavier  and  more  laboured;  but  Cynic  and 
Stoic  pointed  the  same  way,  both  emphasised  Nature. 

The  Sophists  had  raised  the  question  of  Nature.  Plato 
had  gone  deeply  into  it;  all  he  says  of  the  soul,  of  right- 
eousness, of  immortality,  is  based  on  their  ultimate  na- 
ture. The  Stoics  set  Nature  in  the  very  forefront  of 
every  argument;  they  made  Nature  not  merely  their  last 
court  of  appeal,  but  their  first,  and  where  they  could  not 
as  it  were  lay  their  hands  on  Nature  visible  and  obvious, 
they  took  the  next  thing  to  it.  The  consensus  of  man- 
kind was  not  exactly  Nature,  but  it  raised  a  fair  presump- 
tion that  Nature  was  behind  what  Nature  suggested.  So 
far  as  it  goes,  the  presumption  is  sound.  The  probability 
is  that  error  will  be  corrected  out,  if  we  take  a  large 
enough  group  of  observers;  it  is  still  more  likely  that 
we  shall  escape  the  errors  inherent  in  our  own  local  and 
national  traditions,  and  so  far  get  nearer  to  the  univer- 
sal. So  much  for  the  central  principle;  all  now  turned 
on  the  range  and  sureness  of  observation,  and  on  the  use 
made  of  what  was  observed. 

The  Stoic,  beginning  with  Nature,  had  his  principle 
of  unity  at  once;  and  he  carried  it  faithfully  through  all 
his  thinking  and,  as  suggested  above,  he  gave  it  every 
emphasis  that  he  could  think  of.  In  one  picture  and  an- 
other he  tried  to  carry  it  into  .every  man's  business  and 
bosom.  "He  of  old  said,  'Dear  city  of  Cecrops,'  "  writes 
Marcus  Aurelius,  alluding  to  Aristophanes  and  Athens, 
"and  thou,  wilt  not  thou  say,  'dear  city  of  Zeus  ?' ' 

4  Marcus  Aurelius,  iv.  23. 


THE  STOICS  225 

That  thought  runs  through  all  Stoic  teaching;  it  is  no 
abstract  dogma,  it  is  the  foundation  of  all  life  and  all 
thought.  The  universe  is  the  "great  city."  Every  Greek 
knew  the  meaning  of  TroAz?;  the  empires  had  not 
abolished  that  glorious  memory.  A  virtual  republic,  of 
which  all  are  citizens,  of  which  the  laws  are  at  once  in- 
telligible, just  and  unalterable,  an  equality  and  a  fra- 
ternity— "the  common  home  or  city  of  gods  and  men  to- 
gether "  5 — it  is  a  great  and  an  invigorating  conception. 
The  forces  of  Nature  and  the  details  of  Nature,  man's 
mind  and  the  external  world,  are  all  delicately  adjusted 
to  one  another,  in  profound  and  eternal  sympathy.  We 
remember  how  this  idea  reappears  in  Wordsworth,  and 
what  happiness  it  brings  with  it;  and,  in  passing,  we  may 
recall  and  link  with  this  conception  the  "Ode  to  Duty" — 
exactly  the  sort  of  poem  a  Stoic  would  have  written, 
if  only  he  had  the  poetic  feeling  and  genius;  Cleanthes 
was  very  far  from  having  Wordsworth's  gifts.  The 
world  was  not  a  mere  mass  of  material,  of  brute  stuff 
out  of  which  life  was  to  be  carved,  a  wilderness  into 
which  man  might  hack  his  way  and  slowly,  in  such  cor- 
ners as  he  might  make  his  own,  induce  order;  it  was 
order. 

Cosmos  is  no  new  word  in  the  Greek  vocabulary,  but 
it  gains  a  new  meaning  and  a  new  thrill.  The  wise  hus- 
band, in  Xenophon's  pleasant  tale,  inculcates  order,  and 
bidding  his  little  wife  see  the  boots  and  shoes  in  a  row, 
"for  all  their  different  sizes,  how  beautiful  it  is!"  he 
cries.6  The  order  of  the  universe  was  a  joyous  discov- 
ery; the  thought  that  this  order  is  not  one  of  parts,  but 
of  the  whole;  that  it  is  the  order,  not  of  boots  on  a  shelf, 
not  of  a  museum,  but  of  an  engine,  a  splendid  mechan- 

6  Cicero,   N.D.,    ii.    154. 

6  Xenophon,  Oeconomicus,  8,  19.  I  should  like  to  refer  to  Mr.  T.  A.  K. 
Thomson  s  lively  discussions  (in  Greeks  and  Barbarians)  of  the  Greek  finding 
romance  in  order,  not  in  disorder,  in  the  disciplined  society  rather  than  in 
Mexican  ideals. 


226  PROGRESS  IN  RELIGION 

ism,  better  still  of  an  organic  body  or  even  being — this 
was  a  conception  to  make  the  heart  beat.  What  is  true 
of  all  great  discoveries  and  advances  in  the  realm  of 
spirit  and  intellect,  is  true  here  also.  The  Stoic  concep- 
tion of  the  Cosmos  and  its  living  beauty  has  never  been 
lost.  They  passed  it  on  to  all  sorts  of  thinkers,  and,  in 
its  joy  and  its  wonder,  it  is  a  permanent  endowment 
of  the  race.  If  others  led  the  way,  the  gift  of  the  Stoics 
to  mankind  is  not  lessened.  Genius  perhaps  more  often 
shows  us  the  value  of  what  we  have  than  it  gives  us  what 
we  have  not 

Stars  and  seasons  and  souls  of  men,  a  living  vital 
principle  animates  them,  a  principle  intelligible  because 
it  is  one  in  all  things  and  all  men,  a  principle  that  is  in- 
tellectual, a  Logos,  and  yet  the  seed  and  source  of  life, 
Spermaticos.  The  kinship  within  the  great  polls  is  real 
to  the  utmost.  If  man  and  star  are  made  of  one  matter, 
that  is  kinship;  but  if  the  soul  in  both  is  one,  the  kin- 
ship is  a  deeper  and  dearer  thing;  and  that  this  is  true 
is  shown  by  their  mutual  adaptation,  and  clinched  by  the 
fact  that  man  understands  what  he  sees,  that  his  reason 
can  deduce  law  and  principle,  and  that  Nature  verifies 
what  he  finds.  The  whole  is  the  outcome  of  Providence; 
if  the  Stoics  did  not  invent  this  great  word,  they  gave  it 
connotation  and  currency.  With  us  Providence  almost 
inevitably  involves  personality,  but,  as  we  shall  see,  this 
is  only  very  doubtfully  the  Stoic  view.  Law  and  prin- 
ciple— if  we  draw  our  deductions  rigidly,  and  the  Stoic 
did — may  reduce  freedom  to  a  minimum;  and  the  Stoics 
sometimes,  proceeding  from  the  laws  of  Nature,  con- 
tracted the  area  of  human  freedom  with  a  speed  and  a 
drastic  incisiveness  only  equalled  by  men  of  science  to- 
day who  start  from  the  same  point.  The  Stoics  would 
have  none  of  the  Tyche  that  the  vulgar  believed  to  rule 
the  world;  all  was  order,  all  was  law,  all  was  fate.  The 


THE  STOICS  227 

course  of  the  universe  was  ordained;  it  moved  steadily 
on,  and,  when  its  course  was  complete,  a  conflagration 
dissolved  it;  and  then,  like  the  phoenix  from  its  ashes, 
it  emerged  again  to  pursue  precisely  the  same  course.  In 
prose  and  verse  they  laid  this  down — all  is  Law; 

Fata  regunt  orbent;  certa  stant  ontnia  lege? 

So  stiff  a  determinism  inevitably  affected  the  Stoic 
conception  of  God.  A  uniform  doctrine  in  a  philosophic 
school  is  not  to  be  expected ;  the  Stoics  were  many,  and, 
as  happens  in  other  groups,  different  teachers  emphasised 
different  points.  Stoic  teachers  fluctuated  a  good  deal 
upon  God,  but  on  the  universe  they  were  generally  agreed ; 
and  that  was  central  in  their  thinking.  A  universe,  where 
all  is  determined  by  unchangeable  law,  leaves  little  room 
for  a  God  of  much  personality,  unless  we  hold  that  he 
leaves  that  universe  very  generally  to  itself  or,  with  some 
of  the  Stoics  in  certain  moments,  that  God  and  the  uni- 
verse are  an  identity.  They  credited  this  universe  with 
some  sort  of  self-consciousness  or  intelligence,  to  which 
their  doctrine  of  Providence  may  seem  to  be  attached. 
"Constantly  picture  the  universe  as  one  living  thing," 
writes  Marcus  (iv.  40),  "with  one  substance  and  one 
soul;  and  mark  how  all  things  are  referred  to  the  single 
perfection  of  this;  and  how  all  things  act  with  one  im- 
pulse, how  all  are  joint  causes  of  all  existing;  and  of 
what  sort  is  the  contexture  and  concatenation  of  the 
web."  The  system  is  pantheism — the  triumph  of  science 
over  theology,  Julius  Beloch  calls  it.8  When  the  Emperor 
Tiberius  dropped  all  religious  observance,  because,  as 
Suetonius  says,  "he  was  addicted  to  astronomy  and  full 
of  the  conviction  that  all  things  are  done  by  fate,"*  it 

7  Manilius,  iv.    14. 

8  Griech,  Geschichte,  III.   t.  453. 
•  Suetonius,  Tibcrim,  69. 


228  PROGRESS  IN  RELIGION 

was  not  an  illegitimate  inference.  There  was,  as  Bishop 
Lightfoot  pointed  out,  a  contradiction  between  Stoic 
dogma  and  Stoic  hymnology.  To  the  latter  we  may  now 
turn. 

The  hymn  of  Cleanthes  is  famous,  and  a  few  lines 
from  it  in  James  Adam's  translation  will  give  something 
of  its  quality — and  land  us  in  fresh  perplexities. 

O  God  most  glorious,  called  by  many  a  name, 
Nature's  great  King,  through  endless  years  the  same, 
Omnipotence,  who  by  thy  just  decree 
Controllest  all,  hail  Zeus,  for  unto  thee 
Behoves  thy  children  in  all  lands  to  call. 
We  are  thy  children,  we  alone  of  all 
On  earth's  broad  ways  that  wander  to  and  fro, 
Bearing  thy  image  wheresoe'er  we  go. 
Wherefore  with  songs  of  praise  thy  power  I  will  forth  show. 

The  philosopher  then  pictures  the  universe  circling 
round  the  earth,  willingly  ruled,  and  controlled  by  the 
thunderbolt — 

Vehicle  of  the  universal  Word,  that  flows 
Through  all,  and  in  the  light  celestial  glows. 

No  deed  is  done  on  earth  apart  from  thee,  he  continues, 
neither  in  the  divine  aetherial  sky  nor  in  the  sea,  save 
such  acts  as  evil  men  do  by  their  own  folly.  God  knows 
how  to  make  the  crooked  straight,  to  order  the  disorderly ; 
and  things  unlovely  are  to  him  lovely;  so  has  he  fitted 
all  good  to  evil  that  there  is  ever  one  Reason,  or  one 
account,  of  all  for  ever.  This,  however,  evil  men  fly 
from  and  neglect,  pursuing  advantage  and  finding  the 
opposite.  And  he  ends  with  a  prayer  to  Zeus  to  save 
men  from  ignorance,  "that  honoured  we  may  requite 
thee  with  honour,  hymning  thy  works  for  ever  as  be- 
fits a  mortal;  for  neither  for  mortals  nor  for  gods  is 


THE  STOICS  229 

there  greater  gift  than  justly  to  hymn  the  universal  law 
for  ever."  "What  else  can  I  do,  a  lame  old  man,"  asks 
Epictetus,  "but  hymn  God?"10 

God  is  responsible  for  all,  except  man's  folly;  but 
how  that  lies  outside  his  responsibility  is  not  explained. 
Plutarch's  attack  on  the  Stoics  shows  that  he,  and  others, 
saw  the  inconsistency;  it  may  even  imply  that  some  Stoics 
definitely  credited  God  with  everything  done,  as  genuine 
pantheism  involves.  In  other  words  man  seems  to  have 
as  much  freedom  as  God,  perhaps  more;  and  man  has, 
as  far  as  we  can  see,  a  good  deal  more  personality.  What 
volition  the  universe  has,  it  is  hard  to  learn.  In  fact, 
God  is  not  the  main  interest  of  the  Stoic.  "I  put  my- 
self in  the  hands  of  a  Stoic,"  says  Justin  Martyr,  "and 
I  stayed  a  long  time  with  him,  but  when  I  got  no  farther 
in  the  matter  of  God — for  he  did  not  know  himself,  and 
he  used  to  say  this  knowledge  was  not  necessary — I  left 
him."  "  Law,  order,  cosmos  appeal  to  the  Stoic;  on  God 
he  is  content  to  be  indefinite,  at  least  in  public  speech. 
Zeus  or  Jupiter  will  serve  when  he  writes  poetry  or 
preaches;  but  Plutarch's  school  saw  how  little  it  meant. 
The  gods  of  the  Stoic,  said  Plutarch,  melt  in  the  general 
conflagration  like  wax  or  tin;  they  have  as  little  final 
permanence  as  man  resolved  into  elements.12  The  Stoic 
more  or  less  conceded  gods  to  the  vulgar ;  but,  when  their 
nature  was  understood,  they  were  in  general  less  than 
mankind  wanted — temporary  expedients,  that  will  carry 
a  man  some  way,  but  not  all  the  way,  comfortable  for 
the  time,  if  you  can  shut  your  eyes  to  the  future. 

"The  gods,"  says  Seneca,  in  a  letter  not  without  hints 
of  characteristic  eloquence,  "are  not  scornful,  they  are 
not  envious.  They  welcome  us,  and,  as  we  ascend,  they 
reach  us  their  hands.  Are  you  surprised  that  man  should 

10  Epictftvs,  D.,  i.   16;  Conflict  of  Religions,  p.  62. 

11  Justin,   Dial.   c.  Tryphone,   2    (about    160  A.D.). 

12  Plutarch,  de  comm,  not.  adv.  Stoics,  i.  31;  and  de  def.  orac.,  420  A,  c.  19. 


230  PROGRESS  IN  RELIGION 

go  to  the  gods?  God  comes  to  men,  nay!  nearer  still! 
he  comes  into  men.  No  mind  (mens)  is  good  without 
God.  Divine  seeds  are  sown  in  human  bodies."  And, 
in  another  place,  Seneca  puts  the  other  side :  "We  under- 
stand Jove  to  be  ruler  and  guardian  of  the  whole,  mind 
and  breath  of  the  universe,  lord  and  artificer  of  this 
fabric.  Every  name  is  his.  Would  you  call  him  Fate? 
You  will  not  err.  He  ?t  is  on  whom  all  things  depend, 
the  cause  of  causes.  Would  you  call  him  Providence? 
You  will  speak  aright.  He  it  is  whose  thought  provides 
for  the  universe  that  it  may  move  on  its  course  unhurt 
and  do  its  part.  Would  you  call  him  Nature  ?  You  will 
not  speak  amiss.  He  it  is  of  whom  all  things  are  born, 
by  whose  breath  (or  spirit,  spiritu')  we  live.  Would 
you  call  him  Universe?  You  will  not  be  deceived.  He 
himself  is  this  whole  that  you  see,  fills  his  own  parts, 
sustains  himself  and  what  is  his."  14  That,  after  all,  is 
the  last  word  of  Stoicism  on  God. 

Epictetus,  as  we  saw,  purposes  like  Cleanthes  to  hymn 
God;  the  nightingale  does  the  nightingale's  part,  man  a 
rational  creature  ought  as  he  works,  digging,  ploughing, 
eating,  to  sing  to  God  and  tell  his  benefits.15  But  Seneca 
is  as  explicit,  and  a  good  deal  more  rhetorical,  and  per- 
haps more  intelligible  in  forbidding  everything  that  com- 
mon people  called  worship — the  lighting  of  lamps  on  the 
Sabbath,  the  morning  salutation,  the  tender  of  towel  and 
strigil  to  Jupiter,  or  of  the  mirror  to  Juno.  "The  begin- 
ning of  worship  is  to  believe  Gods  exist,  and  then  to  at- 
tribute to  them  their  own  majesty  and  goodness.  Would 
you  propitiate  the  gods?  Be  good.  He  has  worshipped 
them  enough  who  has  imitated  them."  16  So,  while  the 
gods  resolve  themselves  into  phenomena,  allowed  a  sort 
of  honorary  degree  of  existence,  worship  becomes  virtue 

13  Seneca,  Ep.,  73,  15,   16.  15  Epictetus,  D.,  i.   16. 

14  Seneca,  Nat.  Qu.,  ii.  45.  18  Seneca,  Ep.,  95,  47-5°- 


THE  STOICS  (231 

and  sinks  sometimes  to  being  mere  endurance,  submis- 
sion to  Fate  in  its  inevitable  sweep. 

So  far  we  have  bandied  quotations  to  and  fro,  pro  and 
con;  and  they  have  for  us  such  interest  as  a  scheme  of 
thought  will  allow,  that  is  on  the  whole  dead  or  alien. 
It  is  interesting  to  remark  the  fluctuations  between  pan- 
theism and  popular  nomenclature,  between  hymns  of 
piety  and  philosophic  definitions — to  watch  the  human 
spirit  hovering  between  personal  names  for  God  or  gods 
and  a  thoroughgoing  impersonal  conception  of  a  Law. 
It  reveals  to  us  the  conflict  and  the  difficulty  that  filled 
the  religious  arena  in  that  day,  that  are  not  unknown  in 
our  own  day.  The  battle  over  the  personality  of  God 
was  reaching  its  second  phase.  The  personal  gods  had 
vanquished  the  dim  figures  that  held  the  field  before 
them;  now  they  are  going  down  before  an  interpretation 
of  the  universe  reached  by  a  larger  and  truer  thought; 
yet  we  feel  that  the  conquering  new  dogma  does  not  cover 
the  whole  experience  of  man.  So  we  reflect  in  looking 
back.  But  how  did  they  feel,  for  whom  it  was  not  a  ques- 
tion fetched  from  the  past,  who  had  not  the  use  of  nine- 
teen centuries  of  experience,  which,  whatever  we  make 
of  them,  do  come  into  the  story  and  do  suggest  possible 
alternatives — experience  not  then  so  available?  What 
did  Stoic  teaching  mean  to  "God-intoxicated"  souls,  to  / 
men  who  wished  profoundly  to  relate  themselves  and/ 
their  lives  to  some  sort  of  real  and  effective  personality 
more  reliable  than  the  most  inspiring  of  abstract  nouns? 
Stoicism,  in  its  teaching  of  the  universe,  made,  as  we 
have  seen,  a  very  great  contribution  to  human  thought — 
but  a  contribution,  not  a  complete  and  exhaustive  answer 
to  all  our  questions;  and  there  were  plenty  of  people  a 
the  time  who  felt  they  could  accept  the  contribution,  pro 
vided  it  was  not  to  be  taken  as  a  substitute  for  what  the) 
felt  to  be  more  urgent.  But  before  we  turn  to  their'crTt- 


232  PROGRESS  IN  RELIGION 

icism,  we  must  see  how  the  Stoic  treated  human  person- 
ality, a  separate  issue  indeed,  but  of  first  importance 
along  with  the  being  of  God  in  the  story  of  progress  in 
religion. 

Plato  had  struck  the  note  of  human  grandeur;  what 
the  poets  had  made  clear  in  great  story,  he  put  in  the 
explicit  language  of  the  philosopher,  in  glowing  sentences 
that  could  not  die,  but  must  quicken  the  mind  of  man 
for  ever.  The  Stoic,  with  his  conception  of  the  universe 
and  of  God  filling  it  and  moving  it,  seemed  able  to  go 
even  further.  It  was  a  proper  conclusion  from  his  prem- 
ises, that  man  also  is  filled  and  moved  by  God;  and  he 
did  not  hesitate  to  draw  it.  No  teachers  of  classical  an- 
tiquity set  man  so  high  in  the  universe.  Man  is  "a  little 
portion  of  divine  breath,"  "  "a  holy  spirit  (or  breath) 
inhabits  within  him";18  man  is  a  "son  of  God,"  "a 
fragment  of  God."  20  The  "fiery  breath,"  the  Spermatic 
or  life-giving  Reason,  that  animates  all  Nature,  reaches 
consciousness  in  man.  The  Stoic  sage  at  last  maintains 
that  he  and  God  are  equal 21 — a  paradox  resting  on  the 
conception  of  their  common  nature,  but  (as  Seneca's 
confessions  show)  not  to  be  pushed  too  far.  A  being, 
who  is  indeed  a  part  of  God  and  consciously  so,  must 
be  at  home  in  a  universe  which  is,  in  a  sense,  merely  the 
rest  of  himself.  Reason  in  man,  in  the  universe,  in  God, 
is  one  and  the  same  thing — a  genuine  bond  of  kinship. 
So  says  Epictetus,  "our  souls  are  bound  up  and  in  touch 
with  God,  parts  of  him  and  portions  of  him" ; 22  and 
Marcus  Aurelius  emphasises  "a  kinship,  a  community  of 
mind"  (xii.  26).  Thought  and  reason  are  not  accident 
in  man;  they  are  his  essential  nature.  "Slaves  and 
women,  the  Stoics  felt,  should  be  philosophers,"  said 


17  Horace,   Sat.,   ii.   2,  79.  20  Epictetus,  D.,  ii.  8. 

18  Seneca,  £/>.,  41,   i,  2.  21  Plut.,  Adv.  Sto.,  33. 

19  Epictetus,  D.,  i.   9.  22  Epictetus,  D.,  i.  14. 


THE  STOICS  233 

Cicero.23  This  was  to  make  us  all  citizens  of  the  uni- 
verse, indeed,  in  far  more  than  phrase. 

The  Stoic  did  not  leave  man  with  this  new  conscious- 
ness of  Divine  kinship  and  membership  without  a  call 
to  use  it  and  to  live  in  a  new  way.  "The  things  in  thine 
own  power"  is  a  recurring  note,  now  of  warning,  now  of 
encouragement.  There  are  things  which  are  not  in  a 
man's  power — storms  at  sea,  for  instance,  and  the  con- 
duct of  other  men  and  women.  But  there  is  nothing  in 
these  which  interferes  with  or  limits  a  man's  power  of 
keeping  a  balanced  mind,  unswayed  by  the  forces  that 
overset  the  vulgar,  desire,  fear,  pleasure,  and  pain. 
"Enough,"  writes  Horace,  "to  pray  Jove  for  what  he 
gives  and  what  he  takes  away;  let  him  give  life,  let  him 
give  resources;  I  myself  will  provide  the  calm  mind."  2* 
That  is  in  Horace's  recurring  Stoic  vein,  which  crosses 
his  Epicureanism  so  often  and  so  charmingly  and  perhaps 
more  than  half  seriously.  It  is  writ  large  in  later  Roman 
history;  for  this  strong  and  glorious  Stoic  doctrine  un- 
doubtedly made  men,  where  the  material  was  available. 
Thought  was  fired  by  the  consciousness  of  the  divine 
element  within  and  the  divine  without,  and  their  unity; 
and  men  reached  a  level  of  courage,  a  tenacity  of  en- 
durance, and  even  a  height  of  cheerfulness,  which  make 
them  signal  figures  in  an  age  of  depression  and  weakness. 

At  the  same  time,  while  Stoicism  emphasises  and  de- 
velops fortitude  by  its  doctrine  of  the  kinship  of  the 
universe  and  of  the  sympathy  of  all  beings  with  all  other 
beings,  that  outcome  of  kinship  and  sympathy,  which 
would  seem  to  us  most  natural  and  spontaneous,  is  mark- 
edly wanting  in  the  Stoics.  It  might  be  put  epigrammati- 
cally  that  they  have  no  sympathy,  that  the  outcome  of 
their  doctrine  of  the  sympathy  of  the  universe  is  that 

23  Cicero,  N.D.,  Hi.  25. 

24  Horace,  Ep.,  i.  18,  102. 


234  PROGRESS  IN  RELIGION 

"savage  and  hard  apathy"  which  Plutarch  denounces  in 
them.26  The  Stoic  really  failed  to  use  his  doctrine  to 
the  full;  and  he  failed  as  a  result  of  at  least  two  causes — 
first,  he  was  holding  the  fort  in  a  world  very  alien  to 
him  in  spite  of  his  belief  in  its  sympathy;  and,  secondly, 
he  was  wholly  dependent  on  himself,  he  had  nothing  in 
the  way  of  personal  touch  or  fellow-feeling  to  look  for 
from  God,  in  spite  of  the  hopeful  language  about  the 
gods  and  their  friendship  which  he  addressed  to  his  ac- 
quaintance in  the  world.  The  walls  of  his  fortress  would 
be  sapped  by  emotion,  by  human  ties — the  beauty  of  a 
man's  own  wife  may  undo  him,  and  the  charm  of  his 
child;  they  will  tempt  him  into  desire  or  fear,  they  will 
make  him  wish  in  his  power  what  is  not  in  his  power. 
A  man  cannot  be  "self-sufficient,"  as  the  Stoic  felt  he 
must  be,  if  he  depends  on  the  smiling  caress  of  his  little 
son;  no,  he  must  fortify  himself,  as  Epictetus  said,  by 
murmuring  as  he  kisses  the  child,  "To-morrow  thou  wilt 
die."  26  Human  relations  on  such  terms  are  intolerable- 
all  pain,  all  weakness,  and  little  reinforcement.  The 
Stoic,  in  spite  of  his  great  doctrine,  did  not  really  believe 
that  the  universe,  apart  from  its  main  current,  its  drive 
forward,  its  major  laws,  does  contribute.  Marcus 
Aurelius  wrote  in  his  diary,  "Decay  is  in  the  material 
substance  of  all  things — water,  dust,  bones,  stench"  (ix. 
36).  The  comparison  of  Stoicism  with  Wordsworth's 
philosophy  has  often  been  made;  but  what  a  contrast  is 
here  to  the  poet's  mind,  as  for  instance  shown  toward 
the  end  of  the  Lines  written  above  Tintern  Abbey  \  The 
humanity,  which  the  Stoic  emphasises,  is  incomplete  in 
what  we  feel  to  be  one  of  its  most  significant  and 
valuable  aspects. 

It  is  indeed  a  curious  thing  that  with  all  their  im- 

25  Plutarch,  Consol.  ad  Apoll,  3,   102  C. 

26  Cf.  Epictetus,  D.,  iii.  24;  iv.  i;  M.,   n,  26. 


THE  STOICS  235 

portant  contributions  to  Psychology,  including  a  new 
vocabulary  which  held  its  place  in  the  Greek  world  and 
holds  it  still  in  translation,  the  Stoics  made  so  little  of 
emotion,  that  they  missed  its  higher  significance,  and 
could  suggest  little  beyond  its  repression  or  extermina- 
tion. This  was  a  defiance  of  that  Nature  which  the 
school  deified,  a  defiance  that  cost  them  much.  It  made 
demands  of  men  which  they  might  not  have  logic  to  resist 
but  which  instinct  made  them  refuse.  It  wrecked  the 
chance  of  Stoicism  achieving  more  than  the  discipleship 
of  a  few,  however  much  in  eclectic  days  might  be  bor- 
rowed from  the  system  by  other  schools.  It  reacted  un- 
favourably on  the  disciple;  it  made  him  hard,  self-centred 
and  self-pleased,  as  well  as  self-sufficient.  Add  this  spec- 
tacle of  the  isolated  sage  to  the  want  of  motive,  the 
Apatheia,  declining  into  apathy,  which  the  system  in- 
volves for  most  men;  and  the  ultimate  failure  of  Stoic- 
ism was  inevitable.  Again,  the  Stoic  missed  development 
as  the  key  to  man's  nature;  their  cycle  of  being,  that 
returned  again  and  again  after  each  periodic  conflagra- 
tion, made  progress  meaningless  as  the  stone  of  Sisyphus. 
Here  as  with  their  gods,  the  interim  is  all;  everything  is 
make-shift  for  the  meantime;  there  is  no  real  achieve- 
ment. The  most  striking  outcome  of  this  attitude  is  to 
be  seen  in  Marcus  Aurelius,  working  for  ever  for  the 
good  of  his  subjects  and  more  than  half  convinced  that, 
in  spite  of  all  his  labour  and  thought  and  care,  nothing 
worth  while  would  ever  be  effected. 

These  were  heavy  deductions  to  make  from  personal- 
ality,  much  as  the  Stoics  had  done  to  establish  it  with 
their  incessant  emphasis  on  "the  things  in  thine  own 
power,"  and  their  deliberate  development  of  it  in  their 
pupils.  The  word  personality,  it  has  been  noted,  is  lack- 
ing in  their  vocabulary,  a  gap  in  the  equipment  of  all 
ancient  thought.  Cut  off  from  emotion,  deprived  of  the 


236  PROGRESS  IN  RELIGION 

real  hope  of  progress,  human  personality  suffered  al- 
most desperate  loss  at  the  hands  of  the  Stoics,  set  adrift 
from  its  own  nature.  For,  if  the  school  forbade  emotion, 
Nature  gave  it ;  as  she  gave  that  instinct  to  act,  to  stand 
for  right,  to  work  for  the  good  of  mankind,  which  the 
school  encouraged  indeed  by  the  appeal  to  duty  and  dis- 
couraged by  the  withdrawal  of  hope.  These  defects  in 
the  system  man,  subconsciously,  tended  to  make  good  for 
himself — instinct  proving  too  strong  for  thought,  with- 
out reason  necessarily  noticing  what  was  happening.  But 
there  was  worse,  for  Stoicism  forbade  man's  supreme 
hope.  From  days  before  Plato  men  had  been  reflecting 
upon  Immortality.  Plato  had  held  by  the  faith  in  it — 
"the  venture  is  a  glorious  one."  As  the  perplexity  of 
the  world  deepened  and  intensified  the  fear  of  life,  with 
every  fresh  exhibition  of  the  intolerable  instability  of 
things  mundane,  with  every  fresh  reminder  by  the  kings 
and  the  soldiers  to  the  individual  that  he  was  an  indi- 
vidual, a  mere  item  and  nothing  else,  man  was  more  and 
more  driven  in  upon  himself  and  found  in  personality, 
his  own,  and  the  personalities  of  those  whom  he  loved, 
all  he  could  have  or  hope  to  have.  And  now  when  he 
kisses  his  little  son  he  must  say :  "To-morrow  thou  wilt 
die." 

In  the  Dream  of  Scipio  Cicero  sketches  a  future  state 
of  glory  among  the  stars  for  those  who  serve  their  coun- 
try. Glory — yes!  but  Virgil's  sixth  Aeneid  shows  a  ten- 
derer realisation  of  the  meaning  of  that  instinct  which 
makes  men  "reach  forth  hands  in  longing  for  the  further 
shore."  Beyond  the  grave  are — or  ought  to  be — those 
whom  we  loved  in  this  life,  those  whom  we  love  still. 

Venistl  tandem  tuaque  expectata  parenti 
Vicit  iter  pietas? 

But  the  Stoic  addressed  himself  to  the  individual  whom 


THE  STOICS  237 

he  had  trained  to  apathy.  He  must  practise  resignation ; 
he  can  begin  on  a  broken  cup,  a  coat,  and  then  a  puppy, 
and  so  on  to  children,  wife  or  brothers.  While  the  ship 
is  taking  water  aboard  at  a  port,  you  stroll  on  the  beach 
and  pick  up  a  shell  or  pluck  a  flower;  but  when  the  call 
comes,  you  drop  it  and  go  aboard;  "so  in  life  suppose 
that,  instead  of  some  little  shell  or  plant,  you  have  some- 
thing in  the  way  of  wife  or  child,  very  well !"  "  So  the 
deaths  of  those  we  love  are  dismissed;  cockleshell  or 
eldest  son,  something  external  to  self,  "not  in  thine  own 
power."  And  if  a  man,  faced  by  prospect  of  death,  la- 
ment: "But  my  family  will  hunger,"  what  then?  Does 
their  hunger  lead  them  to  another  goal?  Will  it  not 
come  to  the  same  for  them  and  you?28 

What  is  death?  "It  pleased  me,"  wrote  Seneca,  "to 
inquire  of  the  eternity  of  souls — nay!  to  believe  in  it. 
I  surrendered  myself  to  that  great  hope."  29  "How  nat- 
ural it  is !  the  human  mind  will  have  no  bounds  set  to  it 
unless  they  are  shared  by  God."  80  Nature  is  invoked; 
but  reason  and  dogma  have  something  to  say  to  Nature 
when  she  is  interpreted  by  such  simple  instincts  in  so 
popular  a  way.  Seneca  wrote  a  Consolation  to  Marcia 
for  her  son,  and,  after  speaking  of  his  future  life,  he 
remembers  the  ultimate  conflagration.  "Then  we  also, 
happy  souls  who  have  attained  eternity,  when  God  shall 
see  fit  to  reconstruct  the  universe,  when  all  things  fall, 
we  too,  a  little  element  in  a  great  catastrophe,  shall  be 
resolved  into  our  ancient  elements.  Happy  is  your  son 
who  already  knows  this !"  So  it  is  only  a  temporary  im- 
mortality, a  fugitive  eternity,  and  then  like  a  sleep  comes 
for  all  the  conflagration,  with  a  new  start  for  the  uni- 
verse, and  no  Marcia  and  no  son  and  no  Seneca  for  how 
many  myriad  years?  Elsewhere  that  dissolution  into 

27  Epictetus,  Manual,   7.  29  Seneca,  Ep.   102,  2. 

28  Epictetus,  / '.,  iii.  26.  so  Seneca,  Ep.  102,  21. 


238  PROGRESS  IN  RELIGION 

primal  elements  seems  even  nearer  to  Seneca — "Why 
should  I  be  wasted  for  desire  of  him  who  is  either  happy 
or  non-existent?"  81 

Epictetus  is  blunter  than  Seneca;  there  were  fewer 
ties  in  his  life,  and  his  was  a  spirit  of  less  range,  if  more 
intense  and  of  harder  metal.  God  opens  the  door  and 
calls  man  "to  nothing  terrible,  but  whence  you  came,  to 
the  dear  and  kin  [both  adjectives  are  neuter]  the  ele- 
ments. What  in  you  was  fire  shall  go  to  fire;  earth  to 
earth,  air  to  air,  water  to  water."  S2  "Death  is  a  change, 
not  from  what  now  is  into  what  is  not,  but  into  what  is 
not  now.  You  will  be,  but  you  will  be  something  else, 
of  which  the  cosmos  has  just  now  no  need.  You  came 
into  existence,  not  when  you  wished,  but  when  the  cos- 
mos had  need."  83  So  the  great  individual  personality, 
sternly  repressing  the  emotions  that  might  waste  him, 
keeping  his  eyes  fixed  on  God  (whatever  God  is,  con- 
crete, abstract,  personal,  or  Destiny),  firmly  obeying  the 
order  of  the  universe,  resolutely  concentrated  upon  the 
things  in  his  own  power,  is  as  unstable  and  fugitive  as  a 
chalk  sketch  on  a  blackboard  that  a  schoolboy  wipes  out 
when  the  master's  step  is  heard.  It  is  resolved  into  atoms 
of  chalk  on  duster  and  floor;  it  has  not  perished;  it  is 
something  else.  What  stuff  it  all  is! 

Who  would  say  that  a  house  burnt  to  the  ground  with 
all  it  contains,  furniture,  books  gathered  by  one  who 
loved  them,  pictures  of  friends  and  kindred,  is  the  same 
thing  as  the  ashes  to  which  it  is  reduced,  because  there  is 
the  same  quantity  of  carbon  in  the  charred  heap  and  in 
the  gases  liberated  in  air?  The  personality  is  gone,  and 
men  who  laid  such  stress  on  personality  knew  it. 

Men  and  women  who  did  not  philosophise,  but  who 
felt,  and  now  and  then  thought  on  the  basis  of  what  they 

31  Ad  Polyb.,  9,  3. 

32  Epictetus,   D.,   iii.    13. 
83  Epictetus,  D.,  iii.  24. 


THE  STOICS  239 

felt,  knew  also  what  this  teaching  of  the  Stoics  meant. 
For  centuries,  as  we  have  seen,  the  individual  had  been 
growing  in  self -consciousness,  realising  his  place  in  the 
scheme  of  things,  and  now  he  is  told  to  be  for  the  mo- 
ment supremely  more  than  ever  he  was  before,  with  the 
prospect  of  being  utterly  blotted  out  by  death. 

Progress  in  religion,  we  have  seen,  is  marked  by  em- 
phasis on  the  unity  of  existence,  on  the  personality  of 
God,  on  righteousness,  on  the  personality  of  man.  The 
Stoic  taught  nobly  of  the  unity  of  the  cosmos;  of  right- 
eousness his  discourse  was  full;  here  too  he  made  contri- 
butions of  a  great  kind,  in  giving  righteousness  a  purpose 
and  a  centre — life  "agreeably  with  Nature."  But  if 
there  is  to  be  righteousness  in  the  universe,  something 
more  is  due  to  the  human  soul,  some  fuller  recognition 
of  its  nature  and  of  its  claims.  The  Stoic  magnified  per- 
sonality and  blotted  it  out;  and  God  he  left  an  enigma — 
an  enigma  more  enigmatic  for  all  the  emphasis  he  laid 
on  the  wonder  and  glory  and  wisdom  of  all  God's  works. 


XI 

THE  JEWS  AFTER  THE  EXILE 

THREE  great  landmarks  divide  the  history  of  Judaism. 
The  first  is  so  hidden  in  myth  and  legend  that  it  is  hard 
to  be  certain  of  more  than  the  bare  fact,  and  even  sane 
criticism  may  hesitate  about  that.  But  that  Israel  was 
delivered  from  Egypt,  that  this  deliverance  was  associated 
with  Moses,  and  that  a  new  epoch  began  then  in  the 
national  and  the  religious  history  of  the  people,  is  im- 
plied, as  we  have  seen,  in  every  retrospect  of  prophet 
and  psalmist,  and  is  generally  conceded  by  historical 
critics.  What  precisely  Moses  did  or  was,  what  was  the 
nature  of  the  "covenant,"  whether  Jehovah  was  a  new 
or  an  old  god  of  the  people,  and  how  far  his  religion  was 
what  we  have  learnt  to  call  spiritual,  or  mere  cult,  or 
something  of  both — these  questions  are,  as  we  saw,  harder 
to  answer,  but  happily  definite  answers  to  them  are  not 
essential  for  our  present  theme.  The  other  two  land- 
marks involve  no  historical  doubts  whatever;  Judah  was 
carried  captive  to  Babylonia  by  Nebuchadnezzar — Jewish 
graves  have  been  found  at  Nippur;  and  Titus  destroyed 
Jerusalem  and  the  Temple  in  70  A.D. 

The  rise  and  progress  of  Jewish  religion  down  to 
Jeremiah,  the  most  modern  and  the  most  moving  person- 
ality of  the  Old  Testament,  we  have  already  considered. 
Slowly  Israel  had  come  to  recognise  the  unique  and  dom- 
inant position  of  Jehovah.  Jehovah  was  no  longer  a 
god  of  a  tribe  or  a  land,  as  at  one  time  good  Israelites 
had  supposed;1  He  was  Lord  of  the  ends  of  the  earth, 

1  Cf.   i   Sam.  xxvi.   19. 

240 


THE  JEWS  AFTER  THE  EXILE  241 

He  had  given  the  nations  their  lands,  He  and  not  Che- 
mosh  and  Dagon  and  other  abominations.  He  had  not 
been  defeated  and  overthrown  by  Nebuchadnezzar  and 
his  Babylonians;  on  the  contrary,  He  had  caused  His 
people  to  be  carried  captive;  it  was  His  design  and  His 
doing,  and  He  knew  His  thoughts  toward  them.2 

The  1 37th  Psalm  is  a  tragic  document  of  the  cap- 
tivity— vivid,  personal  and  passionate  beyond  any  con- 
secutive nine  verses  of  the  Old  Testament.  The  writer 
has  seen  his  city  sacked,  his  home  destroyed,  and  on  its 
threshold  the  blood-stained  remains  of  what  he  loved 
best  in  the  world.  With  the  rest  of  the  well-to-do  and 
noble  of  the  kingdom,  he  has  been  marched  northward 
through  Syria,  across  the  desert,  down  the  Euphrates,  to 
the  land  of  captivity.  There  his  captors,  companions  of 
the  long  march  and  now  home  again,  singing  their  native 
songs,  ask  him  for  "one  of  the  songs  of  Zion."  They 
did  not  get  it.  Instead  he  broke  away,  and  wrote  a  song 
that  throbs  to-day  with  the  terrible  passion  from  which 
it  came.  His  central  question  sums  up  the  problem  of  his 
people  in  exile.  "How  shall  we  sing  the  Lord's  song  in 
a  strange  land?"  Long  after,  the  answer  was  given  by 
another  poet  of  his  race  in  the  i3Qth  Psalm,  happily 
placed  beside  his  own  in  the  psalter,  whether  by  accident 
or  by  an  editor  who  saw  the  relevance  of  the  two  poems 
to  each  other. 

It  is  a  good  test  of  any  product  of  human  brain  or 
spirit  to  see  how  far  it  will  bear  transplanting.  Will 
your  wit  keep  its  flavour  in  the  next  parish,  across  the 
border  or  the  channel?  Will  your  poem  attract  trans- 
lators, or  will  they  capture  enough  of  it  to  make  it  a 
household  word  in  the  new  tongue,  like  Homer  and 
Shakespeare?  Aristocracy  was  never  really  rooted  in 
English  America;  poverty,  the  forest  and  the  Indians 

2  Jer.  xxix.  4. 


242  PROGRESS  IN  RELIGION 

made  too  hard  a  soil  for  it;  in  French  Canada  it  was 
planted,  but  its  life  depended  on  the  governors  and  bish- 
ops sent  from  old  France.  Buddhism  and  Islam  do  not 
prosper  outside  the  tropics  and  the  subtropical  regions; 
the  climate  is  against  the  ascetic  and  against  Ramadan, 
and  the  Northern  peoples  believe  in  activity,  in  the  stren- 
uous life;  in  their  latitudes  blood  and  brain  call  for  it, 
it  is  the  condition  of  survival.  Athene,  as  we  have  seen, 
had  little  to  do  in  further  Asia;  Adrastus  nothing;  Zeus 
had  to  be  translated  into  a  dogma.  But  the  uprooting 
of  Judah  and  the  destruction  of  the  temple  were  the 
making  of  Judaism. 

Judah  had  listened  only  casually  to  the  Prophets.  "He 
is  a  dreamer;  let  us  leave  him;  pass !"  is  the  attitude.  But, 
as  commonly  happens,  the  practical  man  was  wrong;  the 
dreamer,  who  quarrelled  with  his  people's  ideas  and  com- 
mon-sense, was  right.  Jerusalem  fell;  the  policy  and 
the  cunning  of  its  rulers  had  been  silly,  and  it  proved 
futile,  as  the  greater  prophets  had  foreseen  it  must;  the 
floods  had  washed  away  the  refuge  of  lies.3  If  the  people 
in  exile  was  to  survive  at  all  as  a  distinct  entity,  only  a 
religion  could  save  it.  India  shows  how  small  racial 
groups,  protected  by  a  religion,  become  castes  and  main- 
tain themselves  for  centuries  in  extraordinary  detach- 
ment. The  story  of  the  Beni-Israel  in  the  Bombay  Presi- 
dency is  the  closest  parallel  to  the  Jewish  captivity  in 
Babylon.  No  one  knows  how  or  when  the  Beni-Israel 
came  to  India;  they  were  discovered  there  in  the  Middle 
Ages  by  Jews  from  Cochin.  Their  Jewish  ancestry  and 
religion  are  recognised  by  themselves  and  all  other  Jews, 
but  inter-marriage  with  the  Jews  of  Southern  India,  the 
Bagdadis  or  the  Jews  of  Europe,  is  not  practised.  Their 
religion  has  kept  them  and  still  keeps  them;  and  there 
they  are  still — a  little  people  of  6000  persons,  not  rich, 

3  Isa.  xxviii.   17. 


THE  JEWS  AFTER  THE  EXILE  248 

but  people  of  brain,  who  gave  officers  to  Indian  regiments, 
till  caste  became  the  basis  of  recruiting,  and  the  Beni- 
Israel  could  only  be  officers  to  one  another.  But  had 
those  earlier  sons  of  Israel  a  religion  strong  enough  to 
keep  them?  If  it  was  to  be  a  religion  of  the  high  places, 
of  altar  and  sacrifice  and  ceremony,  then,  in  the  absence 
of  all  these  things,  it  must  die.  It  is  true  that  a  curious 
modern  discovery  of  papyrus  about  1907  has  revealed  a 
Jewish  Temple  at  Yeb  or  Elephantine  in  Upper  Egypt.* 
This  temple,  its  maintainers  say  in  the  surviving  docu- 
ment, Cambyses  spared  and  authorised  when  he  conquered 
Egypt  and  destroyed  Egyptian  temples  (about  520  B.C.)  ; 
but,  they  lament,  their  heathen  neighbours,  egged  on  by 
the  priests  of  Chnum,  the  ram-headed  god  of  the  island, 
have  destroyed  it  (about  410  B.C.).  A  later  Jewish  tem- 
ple at  Leontopolis  in  Egypt  is  attested  as  having  existed. 
In  Babylonia,  however,  the  religion,  cut  off  from  its 
old  supports,  learnt  to  stand  alone;  and  the  loss  of  its 
old  associations  threw  its  adherents  back  upon  thought; 
and  thought  is  individual.  The  leaders  of  religious 
thought  had  been  the  Prophets;  their  writings  and  rec- 
ords had  been  preserved,  and  now  they  were  read  and 
understood.  The  national  tie  was  temporarily  broken; 
men  thought  and  began  to  choose  for  themselves.  The 
weaker  spirits  probably  fell  away  into  new  attempts  to 
combine  the  worship  of  Jehovah  with  the  cults  of  the 
land,  not  unlike  those  made  for  centuries  in  Palestine; 
and  all  such  syncretisms  were  inevitably  avenged  by  the 
merging  of  those  who  made  them  into  the  communities 
among  which  they  lived.  Fusion  in  religion  meant  fu- 
sion in  blood  and  the  utter  disappearance  of  the  new- 
comers in  the  course  of  a  few  generations.  Syncretism 
was  no  doubt  defensible  on  philosophic  grounds  as  well 

4  Cf.   Driver,   Schweich  Lectures,  pp.  28-30;    Charles,   Apocrypha  and  Psev- 
donyma,  i.  pp.   180,   187,   194. 


244.  PROGRESS  IN  RELIGION 

on  the  more  vulgar  grounds  of  superstition  and  social 
and  economic  gain;  it  could  be  described  as  a  larger  life, 
a  broader  outlook,  a  recognition  of  other  spiritual  values 
— we  know  the  insidious  jargon,  shallow  with  its  brag 
of  width,  and  we  can  understand  how  it  meant  religious 
and  national  death.  But  if  the  shallower  and  the  feebler 
fell  away,  there  was  a  growth  of  stronger  fibre  in  the 
fittest  of  spirit  who  survived.  When  the  prophetic  re- 
ligion became  the  centre  of  national  existence,  the  centre 
of  thought,  it  began  to  react  more  and  more  upon  all  life; 
it  drew  to  itself  passion,  it  became,  in  Seeley's  phrase, 
enthusiastic  and  was  safe.  Monotheism  proved  then  for 
the  first  time  what  it  has  been  triumphantly  since  then 
all  over  the  world  and  in  all  sorts  of  races,  the  most 
powerful  and  the  most  permanently  attractive  and  in- 
spiring type  of  religion;  and  further  it  showed  its  inde-v 
pendence  of  what  till  then  had  been  regarded  as  the  es- 
sentials of  religion.  Jeremiah  had  prophesied  of  what 
we  call  personal  religion ;  there  would  be  a  new  covenant 
with  Israel,  every  man  would  know  Jehovah,  none  would 
need  to  teach  his  brother,  but  in  every  man's  heart  the 
laws  of  Jehovah  would  be  written.8  Religion  began  to 
become  an  individual  thing,  conviction  not  tradition. 
Thus  in  Israel,  as  in  Greece,  the  breakdown  of  the  na- 
tional preconceptions,  the  collapse  of  state  and  temple 
and  old  belief,  worked  out  in  new  emphasis  on  the  uni- 
versal reach  and  significance  of  God  and  a  new  weight 
and  stress  thrown  upon  the  individual.  The  spiritual  con- 
ception of  religion  had  gained  a  victory,  the  results  of 
which  have  never  been  lost. 

Israel,  it  has  been  said,  went  into  exile  a  nation  and 
came  back  a  church;  and  it  is  true  in  more  ways  than 
one.  The  old  tendency  to  lapse  and  lapse  again  into 
idolatry  is  gone ;  Israel  is  solid  for  Jehovah  and  there  are 

6  Jer.  xxxi.  31;  cf.  p.   148. 


THE  JEWS  AFTER  THE  EXILE  245 

(eventually)  no  other  gods.  He  overtopped  them  all, 
and  gradually  they  fell  into  utter  nonentity;  they  simply 
did  not  exist.  The  transformation  of  Israel's  belief  was 
the  transformation  of  Israel ;  the  national  character  took 
a  new  development;  the  Jew  became  distinct  among 
Semites,  definite,  pronounced,  exclusive.  Heine's  Prin- 
cess Sabbath  reads  like  a  fairy  tale  and  it  is  history;  and 
the  Jew  is  the  only  race  with  such  a  history,  with  such 
a  fairy  tale.  Polytheism  for  all  its  legends  is  a  squalid 
unromantic  thing;  but  Judaism  has  always  had  its  ele- 
ments of  passion  and  romance.  But  when  Israel  is  de- 
scribed as  a  church,  more  is  indicated  than  pure  spiritual 
religion.  The  Israel  that  returned  from  exile  is  not  so 
much  the  Israel  of  Jeremiah  as  of  Ezekiel.  A  church  is 
always  associated  with  organisation,  and  often  over- 
shadowed by  it.  Side  by  side  with  the  individualism  and 
the  romance  of  Hebrew  religion,  there  has  been  an  ele- 
ment of  legalism — an  element  that  grew  progressively 
in  its  hold  upon  all  life  and  its  influence  upon  all  thought. 
Ezekiel  was  hereditarily  a  priest  of  the  Jerusalem  tem- 
ple, a  student  of  the  earlier  religious  and  ritual  customs, 
legends  and  traditions  of  Israel,  a  man  who  read  books 
and  who  perhaps  found  the  pen  a  more  natural  and  ready 
means  of  expression  than  the  voice.  Symbol  and  art 
appealed  to  him,  where  Nature  moved  Jeremiah.  When 
Jeremiah  is  stirred,  pictures  of  nature,  of  animals  of  the 
desert  and  the  farm,  rise  in  his  mind.  Ezekiel's  pictures 
are  of  cherubim,  of  eagles,  bulls  and  lions  as  they  are, 
not  in  the  desert,  but  on  the  monuments.6  Babylon  is 
written  in  his  mind.  The  future  religion  of  Israel  will  be 
a  development  of  the  past;  a  priest  can  never  forget  the 
past;  to  maintain  and  transmit  it  is  his  trade  and  his  in- 
stinct. Ezekiel  begins  that  fusion  of  priestly  and  pro- 
phetic religion  which  makes  the  later  Judaism.  He  and 

c  Cf.  J.  P.  Peters,  Religion  of  Hebrews,  p.  286. 


246  PROGRESS  IN  RELIGION 

Ezra  are  the  two  great  figures  of  the  revival,  as  signifi- 
cant in  their  way  as  Moses.  Indeed,  a  modern  scholar 
says  that  Ezekiel  had  a  profounder  influence  on  Judaism 
than  any  one  man.  He  is  a  pastor  of  souls,  the  dreamer 
who  builds  a  sanctuary,  a  system  and  a  law,  which  be- 
come the  inspiration  of  the  people.  The  Temple,  Juda- 
ism, the  Torah — these  things  are  Israel's  religion;  and 
not  one  of  them  is  of  first  importance,  or  perhaps  of  any 
importance  at  all,  to  Jeremiah.  Free  of  the  past  and  yet 
devoted  to  it,  the  new  type  of  religious  Israelite  can  de- 
velop the  past  and  transform  it  without  realising  how 
revolutionary  is  his  work.  The  very  distance  from  Jeru- 
salem made  the  city  more  significant  and  more  easy  to 
remodel.  The  law  itself  is  rewritten;  the  code  known  as 
the  Priestly  takes  shape,  and  at  last — the  process  and 
the  dates  do  not  concern  us  at  the  moment — the  Penta- 
teuch, as  history  knows  it,  is  evolved.  The  anthropo- 
morphisms of  the  older  books  are  toned  down,  the  sen- 
suous imagery  reduced.  God  becomes  transcendent;  He 
no  longer  shapes  man  of  clay,  He  speaks  and  it  is  done; 
He  breathes  no  breath  into  man's  nostrils,  He  plants  no 
garden,  nor  is  heard  walking  in  one.  When  He  will 
communicate  His  will  to  man,  it  is  by  intermediaries,  by 
angels. 

The  history  of  the  Jews  in  Palestine  from  the  return 
under  Cyrus  to  the  invasion  of  Alexander  is  obscure. 
The  policy  of  the  Persian  was  in  general  not  to  interfere 
with  local  religious  practices — in  spite  of  what  Herodo- 
tus was  told  about  Cambyses  in  Egypt.  If  a  nation  is 
happy  in  having  no  history,  the  Jews  perhaps  were  happy 
then.  But  the  story  of  Nehemiah  around  the  year  444 
B.C.  shows  how  small  and  anxious  the  Jewish  state  was. 
The  mutilation  of  that  attractive  autobiography,  in  order 
to  its  fusion  with  the  poorer  matter  now  combined  with 
it,  is  the  worst  editorial  crime  committed  on  the  Old  Tes- 


THE  JEWS  AFTER  THE  EXILE          247 

tament.  Nehemiah  and  Ezra  between  •  them  achieved 
the  victory  of  particularism  among  the  Jews.  Worship 
was  at  last  concentrated  at  Jerusalem,  if  we  neglect,  as 
we  may,  the  heretical  offshoot  at  Gerizim.  The  High 
Priest  became,  like  a  Greek  patriarch  in  old  days  at  Con- 
stantinople, the  head  of  the  nation.  In  this  period  the 
Pentateuch  was  not  only  given  its  present  form,  but  be- 
came the  book  of  the  religion,  the  code  of  the  community. 
The  national  history  shared  the  fate  of  the  national  law; 
it  too  was  rewritten,  adjusted  to  the  law-book ;  the  good 
kings  were  good  because  they  observed  the  law  as  re- 
written after  the  exile,  the  bad  were  bad  because  they 
did  not. 

In  this  period,  however,  we  must  date  the  rise  of  the 
Synagogue  alongside  of  the  Temple — a  natural  simple 
development  which  has  outlasted  the  Temple  by  many 
centuries,  and  which,  in  spite  of  the  enormous  importance 
attached  by  Jews  and  by  a  too  imitative  Christian  Church 
to  the  Pentateuch,  has  had  a  greater  influence  than  the 
Temple  on  mankind.  The  Temple  had  the  fate  of  tem- 
ples; its  hereditary  priesthood  became  like  other  priest- 
hoods, worldly-minded,  conservative  and  important.  The 
High  Priests  were  practically  princes,  and  like  the  prince- 
archbishops  of  the  later  Middle  Ages  they  shaped  their 
conduct  by  the  maxims  and  policies  of  the  world,  secure 
that  the  religion  which  gave  them  their  place  could  main- 
tain it  without  the  help  of  their  example.  Deuteronomy 
enacted  three  pilgrimages  to  Jerusalem  a  year  to  be  made 
by  every  adult  male.  Of  course  this  was  impossible  for 
Jews  living  in  Babylon  or  Upper  Egypt,  as  it  was  im- 
possible, later  on,  for  Jews  in  Italy  and  beyond;  and  if 
the  religion  was  to  continue  effective,  some  plan  must 
be  devised  for  keeping  Jews  together  and  in  touch  with 
the  essence  of  their  religion.  The  Synagogue  managed 
this.  It  became,  we  can  believe,  unofficially,  a  gathering 


248  PROGRESS  IN  RELIGION 

of  Jews  on  Saturday;  and  in  the  casual  references  of  New 
Testament  writers  we  can  make  out  the  general  course  of 
proceedings.  The  Pentateuch  and  the  Prophets  were 
read  aloud;  7  the  psalms  were  sung;  there  was  prayer; 
persons  spoke.  To  the  Gentile  the  whole  thing  was  queer 
and  rather  absurd.  Worship  without  a  proper  temple — 
without  sacrifice  and  altar  (for  there  could  be  neither  in 
the  synagogue;  both  were  concentrated  at  Jerusalem) — 
without  a  priest  (for  the  synagogue  ministrants  were 
technically  laymen) — without  a  god  (for  there  was  no 
idol  or  other  symbol) — the  idea  was  ludicrous.  Call  the 
Jews  however  a  nation  of  philosophers,8  and  it  might 
pass;  the  synagogue  was  more  like  a  school  than  a  temple. 
As  a  manifestation  of  religion  it  was  an  innovation  and 
a  daring  one;  and  not  only  so  from  the  Greek  but  from 
the  Jewish  point  of  view. 

The  Synagogue  was  a  visible  expression  of  some  of 
those  tendencies  in  religion  which  we  have  been  studying. 
It  meant  the  universality  of  Jehovah  and  the  unity  of 
God ;  or  it  was  meaningless.  Its  democratic  ways  recog- 
nised practically  what  the  Christian  Church  later  on 
called  the  priesthood  of  all  believers.  The  reading  of  the 
Prophets  and  of  the  Law,  remodelled  with  some  of  the 
prophetic  inspiration,  kept  the  great  standard  of  Mono- 
theism before  men ;  more,  it  kept  before  their  minds  the 
great  conception  of  the  personal  God  Jehovah;  no  ab- 
stract noun,  no  dogma,  but  God  Himself  was  the  centre 
of  this  philosophic  school.  Again,  the  exposition  of  Law 
and  Prophets,  not  strictly  official  to  begin  with,  meant 
that  religion  was  the  real  business  of  every  man;  he 

7  Josephus,   c.   Apion.   ii.    18,   "to  hear  the  Law  and   to  hear   it   accurately." 
W.    Fairweather,    Background    of   Gospels,    25-27;    J.    P.    Peters,    Rclig.    Hebr., 
381-392;  397. 

8  Clearchus,    the    Peripatetic,    appears    to   have    written    a    dialogue,    in    which 
Aristotle  says  that  philosophers  among  the   Indians  are  called   Kalanoi,   among 
the  Syrians  Judaioi,  and  adds  that  he  met  in  Asia  Minor  a  Jew  with  a  Greek 
soul.     Josephus,   c.   Apion.   i.   22,   p.   454,   cited  by  Eusebius,  Praepar.   Evang., 
ix.  5,  p.  409  C. 


THE  JEWS  AFTER  THE  EXILE  249 

must  understand  what  he  was  doing,  the  prophets  were 
not  irrelevant  to  him.  The  great  principle  that  Paul 
long  after  laid  down,  when  he  said  "I  will  sing  with  my 
understanding;  I  will  pray  with  my  understanding," 
underlay  the  practice  of  translation  and  explanation  pur- 
sued in  the  Synagogue;  it  was  an  attempt,  not  designed 
perhaps,  but  the  more  effectual  for  being  spontaneous, 
to  fulfil  the  prophecy  of  Jeremiah,  that  every  man  should 
know  and  understand  to  keep  the  law.  Hebrew  was  be- 
coming an  obsolete  language,  maintained  for  religious 
purposes,  while  Aramaic  was  the  current  speech  of  Syria 
and  reached  eastward  to  the  Euphrates.9  The  device  of 
keeping  sacred  texts  in  Hebrew  and  translating  them  in 
the  Synagogue  into  Aramaic  was  a  characteristic  compro- 
mise. Later  on  the  Old  Testament  was  translated  into 
Greek  under  the  Ptolemies.  Legend  10  gave  the  trans- 
lation a  fixed  date,  a  royal  origin,  and  the  sanction  of 
miracle;  but  probably  its  real  source  was  a  higher  thing — 
the  sense  that  the  individual  has  a  right  to  know  the  mind 
of  his  God  in  the  language  that  comes  most  naturally  to 
him.  Schiirer  compared  the  effect  of  the  Septuagint  with 
that  of  Luther's  German  Bible;  it  was  the  very  founda- 
tion of  a  religion. 

It  may  be  remarked  that,  while  no  competition  was  felt 
or  suggested  between  Synagogue  and  Temple — indeed 
later  on  we  find  special  Synagogues  in  Jerusalem  itself — 
the  two  centres  of  religion  evolved  types  markedly  dif- 
ferent. The  Temple  produced,  as  already  said,  a  heredi- 
tary priesthood,  more  interested  in  the  performance  of 
ceremony  than  in  the  progressive  discovery  of  truth, 
conservative  in  ideas,  but  for  all  its  orthodoxy,  more 
amenable  to  easy  Hellenistic  ways  than  those  whose  re- 
ligion was  more  reflective.11  It  was  a  real  gain  to  Juda- 

9  J.   P.  Peters,  Rel.  of  Hebr.,  397;   Neh.  xiii.   24,  contrast  2  Kings  xviii.  26. 

10  See  R.   R.  Ottley,  Handbook  to  the  LXX,  pp.  31  ff. 

11  Strabo,  c.  761,  says  they  were  much  involved  in  brigandage. 


250  PROGRESS  IN  RELIGION 

ism,  and  to  the  world,  that  concentration  in  Jerusalem 
kept  the  priesthood  from  exercising  a  preponderant  in- 
fluence on  the  scattered  Jewish  people.  In  the  syna- 
gogues there  rose  another  sort  of  man,  the  Scribe,  a  lay- 
man, a  student  of  books,  a  teacher,  and  in  real  contact 
with  his  people,  more  open  to  movements  in  religion,  a 
democrat  without  knowing  it,  a  pioneer  in  religious 
thought  in  spite  of  himself,  as  he  read  and  thought  and 
possessed  himself  of  the  problems  that  bore  hard  on  the 
ordinary  honest  people  he  met. 

It  was  the  Scribe  who  made  the  new  Judaism,  and 
who,  himself  more  responsive  to  Greek  thought  than  to 
Greek  ways,  maintained  against  heathen  influences  a  re- 
ligion which  meant  more  and  more  in  time — a  religion  of 
men  deepened  by  the  battle  with  doubt,  made  at  once 
harder  and  more  tender  by  their  experience  of  life,  and 
ever  more  deeply  rooted  in  Jehovah.  Jesus  was  probably 
far  from  being  the  only  visitor  to  the  temple  who  was 
shocked  by  its  naked  commercialism,  its  shallowness  and 
vulgarity,  who  felt  the  contrast  between  the  house  of 
prayer  and  the  den  of  thieves.12  The  Synagogue  was  a 
house  of  prayer;  so  on  a  smaller  scale  was  the  Pro$eucha, 
if  it  was  not  the  same  thing;  in  both  religion  was  for  the 
time  real,  nursed  in  freedom  of  speech,  in  spiritual  tra- 
ditions free  from  the  mechanical  taint  of  priest  and  sac- 
rifice, not  yet  overborne  by  conservative  erudition — the 
Wonder  House  of  the  Princess  Sabbath;  for  the  Syna- 
gogue transformed  the  Sabbath  too  from  a  day  of  taboos 
(though  these  indeed  survive)  to  a  day  of  worship,  of 
spiritual  deepening  and  spiritual  imagination.  The 
Psalter  in  the  main  belongs  to  this  period  and  gives  a 
vivid  picture  of  the  religion.  The  extreme  ease  with 

12  Dr.  Theodore  H.  Robinson  has  suggested  that,  quite  apart  from  money- 
changers and  traders  (who  at  tourist  centres  and  places  of  pilgrimage  might 
merit  the  hard  name),  the  sanctuary  at  Jerusalem  drew  to  itself  a  more  openly 
recognisable  thief  element,  as  sanctuaries  have  done  elsewhere. 


THE  JEWS  AFTER  THE  EXILE          251 

which  the  Christian  Church  annexed  the  Psalter  and 
found  in  it  the  word  for  much  of  its  own  richest  experi- 
ence, is  evidence  enough  of  the  character  of  the  com- 
munity and  the  religion  from  which  the  Psalter  came. 
In  this  case  the  adoption  of  the  book  meant  neither  a 
false  system  of  interpretation  nor  a  violent  return  to 
pre-Christian  and  indeed  pre-prophetic  notions. 

But  even  the  most  alive  and  progressive  religion  is 
exposed  to  the  danger  of  conservatism.  The  old  man, 
the  old  place,  the  old  ways,  have  an  appeal  to  which  all 
human  beings  are  susceptible,  an  appeal  legitimate  but 
seductive.  In  the  Gospels  and  in  the  Talmud  we  have 
evidence  of  how  settled  and  how  wooden  a  living  religion 
may  in  time  become.  Prophets  emancipate  religion  and 
priests  re-enslave  it.  In  every  man  there  is  some  element 
of  prophet  and  some  of  priest;  and  timidity,  routine,  the 
lapse  of  years  tend  to  atrophy  the  prophet  in  all  of  us 
and  to  develop  the  priest.  When  religion  begins  to  suc- 
cumb to  tradition,  and  when  progress  and  the  broader 
and  higher  life  which  it  means  begin  to  be  associated 
with  a  body  of  ideas  actually  or  supposedly  hostile  to 
religion,  we  know  by  now  what  dangers  await  the  spir- 
itual life  of  a  people;  we  have  seen  it  again  and  again 
in  history ;  we  are  face  to  face  with  those  dangers  to-day. 
Judaism  was  saved  from  those  dangers  by  a  storm  of 
persecution  that  threatened  its  existence. 

Little  is  known  of  any  real  relations  between  Alexan- 
der the  Great  and  the  Jews.13  Later  Jewish  historians 
filled  the  gap  in  knowledge  with  legend.  It  is  curious 
how  uniformly  generation  by  generation  the  Jews  re- 
wrote their  history.14  A  certain  parallelism  may  be  noted 

13  Josephus  says  that  Alexander  visited  Jerusalem;  Arrian  has  no  such  story 
nor    the    other    historians    of    Alexander,    and    it    is    not    believed.      See    Niese, 
Griech.    Gesch.,  i.   p.   83,  n.   3.  who   agrees  with   Ewald  that   it  is  an   invention 
of  the  first  century   B.C.  . . 

14  Cf.  Wendland,  hell. -ram    Kultur,   197;  Sir  George  Adam  Smith,  Jerusalem, 
ii.  407- 


252  PROGRESS  IN  RELIGION 

with  modern  Hinduism,  and  may  suggest  a  common  ex- 
planation. There  is  the  same  writing  up  of  the  glories 
of  the  past ;  the  same  extravagant  claim  that  the  foreigner 
owes  all  his  inventions,  his  poetry,  his  philosophy,  to  bor- 
rowed models — the  Greek  to  the  Jew  in  the  one  case,  the 
Greek  and  others  to  the  Hindu  in  the  other;  there  is  the 
same  want  of  criticism,  the  same  indifference  to  real  his- 
tory, the  same  absence  of  seriousness.  Side  by  side  with 
these  more  outward  expressions  of  national  feeling,  we 
may  note  further  the  same  exclusiveness  in  life,  in  mar- 
riage and  food  taboos,  and  the  same  rigidity  of  law,  while 
the  sicarii  and  zealots  of  Roman  Palestine  have  their 
parallel  in  the  bomb-throwers  and  Tilaks  of  British  India. 
The  Jews  re-wrote  their  history,  filling  it  with  imaginary 
glories  and  false  records  of  persecution  gloriously  over- 
come. As  a  result,  little  is  known  of  actual  history  for 
several  periods,  which  were  obviously  formative.  But 
with  Antiochus  Epiphanes  we  reach  real  history,  and  a 
strong  clear  light  falls  upon  the  people  at  a  critical  mo- 
ment. The  story  is  familiar,  and  the  detail  does  not 
concern  us  at  present. 

Antiochus,15  a  king  with  a  slight  hint  of  genius,  a 
deal  of  the  charlatan,  and  something  of  the  madman, 
came  of  a  family  of  princes  progressively  declining  from 
the  solid  merits  of  their  founder,  the  sturdy  general  of 
Alexander.  It  was  about  a  hundred  years  after  the  death 
of  his  ancestor  Seleucus  that  he  returned  to  Syria,  to  be 
king.  After  a  childhood  in  a  Seleucid  palace,  he  had  lived 
in  Rome  for  about  thirteen  years  as  a  hostage.  He  liked 
Roman  ways,  and,  as  a  good  successor  of  Alexander,  he 
believed  in  his  mission  to  extend  Hellenic  culture;  but  he 
was  a  sultan  by  inheritance  and  by  long  residence  a  for- 
eigner. He  did  not  know  the  vital  facts  of  the  situation. 

16  Polybius,  xxvi.   i;  Livy,  xli.   19;  Bevan,  House  of  Seleucus,  ii.  chap.  25; 

Jerusalem,   pp.    74  ff. 


THE  JEWS  AFTER  THE  EXILE          253 

If  the  Jerusalem  prince-priests,  as  degenerate  as  he,  were 
ready  to  be  Hellenised,  it  did  not  follow  that  all  the  Jews 
were  equally  ready.  We  have  seen  that  Temple  and 
Synagogue  represent  two  distinct  types  of  religion,  linked 
by  tradition,  by  sacred  books,  and  by  race,  but  different 
in  spirit,  in  ideal,  and  in  life.  The  Temple  was  quickly 
Hellenised  by  the  king — polluted,  good  Hebrews  said. 
Next  a  royal  mandate  prohibited  the  practice  of  Jewish 
religion  (i  Mace.  i.  44).  Then  came  the  real  struggle 
with  the  people  for  whom  Jehovah  was  real,  and  a  family 
of  heroes  led  them.  As  has  happened  so  often  in  history, 
the  seed  of  the  future  is  saved  by  a  happy  series  of  ir- 
relevant chances.16  Properly  led  and  organised,  the 
forces  of  Persia  could  have  crushed  the  Greeks,  always 
ready  to  betray  one  another.  If  Antiochus  had  had  his 
hands  free — but  that  sort  of  man  never  has  his  hands 
free;  the  man  who  acts  on  imperfect  realisation  of  a  sit- 
uation is  always  falling  over  himself,  as  Thucydides  said 
of  Xerxes.17  The  Greek  proverb  put  it  that  "the  dice  of 
Zeus  fall  aye  aright."  18  Providence,  in  spite  of  our  cyni- 
cisms about  the  biggest  battalions,  manages  in  spite  of 
them.  The  forward  movements  do  survive  against  the 
probabilities;  the  irrelevant  chances  saved  Judaism  in 
Palestine.  If  it  had  been  crushed  there,  as  it  was  two 
centuries  and  a  half  later  by  Titus,  there  were  still  the 
synagogues  elsewhere.  However,  not  to  speculate  on 
what  might  have  happened  and  did  not  happen,  Judaism 
survived  Antiochus.  It  gained  from  the  struggle  a  new 
dynasty  which  contributed  to  it  in  two  ways,  giving  it 
heroes  and  ideals  to  begin,  and,  later,  oppressors  and  re- 
actions; and  in  both  ways  the  Maccabaeans  did  service. 

18  Tacitus,   Hist.,  v.   8;    Antiochus   was  prevented  by  a   Parthian  war  from 
civilising  a  horribje  race. 

17  Thucydides,   i.  69,   5. 

18  Sophocles,  Fr.  763. 


254  PROGRESS  IN  RELIGION 

But  the  spiritual  gain  from  the  struggle  with  A'ntiochus 
was  independent  of  any  dynasty. 

The  Maccabaean  movement  has  been  well  called  the 
watershed  of  those  centuries.19  Before  it  the  nation 
showed  signs  of  religious  decay.  Haggai  and  Zechariah 
had  had  difficulty  in  getting  the  Jews  to  rebuild  the  Tem- 
ple. Ecclesiasticus,  a  book  which  is  roughly  coeval  with 
Antiochus,  gives  a  picture  of  Judaism  as  it  then  was — 
none  the  less  telling  a  picture  for  the  writer  being  highly 
satisfied  with  himself  and  his  outlook.  A  cultured  and 
liberal 20  and  yet  genuine  Jew — orthodox,  moderate  and 
canny — he  shows  us  to  what  the  national  religion  might 
come.  He  is  monotheist,  of  course,  and  he  says  the  usual 
and  proper  good  words  about  God,  for  whom  he  has  re- 
spect without  warmth.  He  emphasises  the  glory  of  the 
Law,  and  lays  stress  on  the  central  idea  of  personified 
Wisdom.  He  believes  Judaism  superior  to  Hellenism,  as 
a  good  Jew  should ;  but  he  is  not  very  nationalist.  He  is 
not  interested  in  angels  nor  very  much  in  a  Messiah;  he 
has  no  great  hope  of  Immortality  nor  much  desire  for  it. 
"What  pleasure  hath  God  in  all  that  perish  in  Hades,  in 
place  of  those  who  live  and  give  him  praise?  Thanks- 
giving perisheth  from  the  dead  as  from  one  that  is  not; 
he  that  liveth  and  is  in  health  praiseth  the  Lord"  (xvii. 
27,  28)  :  "Fear  not  death;  it  is  thy  destiny  .  .  .  this  is 
the  portion  of  all  flesh  from  God,  and  how  canst  thou 
withstand  the  decree  of  the  Most  High?  Be  it  for  a 
thousand  years,  for  a  hundred  or  for  ten,  that  thou  livest, 
in  Sheol  there  are  no  reproaches  concerning  life" 
(xli.  3,  4). 

After  the  crisis  that  Antiochus  so  suddenly  brought 
upon  Judaism,  everything  is  altered.  As  in  so  many 
times  of  crisis,  a  great  call  is  made  on  God;  God  has  to 

19  Fairweather,  Background  of  Gospels,   p.   128. 

20  Cf.  Eccles.   xxxii.   3-6,  music;  xxxviii.   medicine. 


THE  JEWS  AFTER  THE  EXILE          255 

answer  many  more  demands  of  the  human  spirit,  which 
in  days  of  smug  prosperity,  like  those  reflected  in  Ecclesi- 
asticus,  are  deadened.  God  must  be  more  interested  in 
Israel  than  in  days  of  peace;  He  must  take  more  care 
of  the  individual  Israelite.  Once  more,  as  in  the  cap- 
tivity, emphasis  falls  on  God  and  on  human  personality. 
The  individual  reaches  a  new  level  of  self -consciousness. 
The  sense  of  having  a  real  witness  to  bear  for  Jehovah 
raises  the  nation  to  dignity.  The  misery  and  anxiety 
of  the  struggle  throw  thinkers  back  upon  the  former 
days  when  the  arm  of  the  Lord  was  revealed,  when  fire 
would  not  burn  His  confessors  nor  lions  tear  them,  when 
the  Lord  intervened  and  saved  His  own.  Antiochus 
first,  and  later  on  the  degenerate  Maccabaeans,  and  later 
still  Herod  and  the  Romans,  drive  men  to  range  into 
the  next  world  for  truth  and  comfort  and  salvation. 
Fierce  as  the  antithesis  of  Judaism  became  to  Hellenism, 
the  Greek  had  made  some  contributions,  or  had  asked 
some  questions,  in  the  matter  of  God  and  the  soul.  Con- 
tribution and  question  are  often  the  same  thing.  From 
the  Maccabaean  resistance  to  Antiochus  we  may  date 
the  later  Judaism,  self-conscious,  nationalist,  and  yet 
more  universal  than  before  in  outlook. 

Hellenism  made  its  effect  at  once  by  charm  and  by 
repulsion,  by  insidious  appeal  and  by  bold  challenge. 
The  Jew  could  no  more  escape  this  influence  than  any 
other  thinking  people.  By  way  of  reminder  let  us  look 
again  at  what  Hellenism  did  and  made  men  do.  It  drove 
them  to  think  of  all  the  world  at  once;  this  habit  of 
mind  it  might  call  philosophy,  but  it  is  an  integral  part 
of  religion  as  we  have  seen,  a  tendency  operative 
wherever  religion  is  to  be  deep  and  real.  Where 
Hellenism  came,  men  could  no  longer  be  provincial. 
Local  and  racial  tradition  must  be  re-examined,  univer- 


256  PROGRESS  IN  RELIGION 

salised.  The  Hebrew  might  call  Jehovah  God  of  the 
whole  earth ;  but  was  He  ?  Many  a  trivial  King  of  kings 
is  known  to  history  who  was  not  King  of  kings.  Our 
own  coinage  proclaimed  our  kings  for  centuries  kings 
of  France  when  they  were  nothing  of  the  sort.  Was 
this  Hebrew  claim  for  Jehovah  the  language  of  Temple- 
praise,  or  did  it  answer  to  discoverable  fact?  Was  He 
anything  like  Plato's  "father  and  maker  of  all  things"? 
Did  He  stand  actually  behind  all  Creation,  in  it? 
Hellenism,  again,  always  emphasised  the  individual  by 
claim  and  question.  He  shall  stand  up  and  challenge 
the  universe  to  be  intelligible  to  his  mind,  to  be  endurable 
to  his  heart,  to  explain  itself  and  submit  to  him.  And 
then  he  shall  ask  that  self  of  his,  what  is  it  and  for  how 
long?  Do  his  powers  of  mind  suggest  or  promise  any- 
thing to  his  soul  or  to  his  heart? 

We  must  now  deal  with  the  new  views  of  God,  which 
emerge  and  grow  more  and  more  dominant  in  the  five 
centuries  after  Cyrus  and  the  return  from  the  captivity. 
The  period  is  a  long  one,  but  our  task  is  not  to  chronicle ; 
it  is  to  watch  for  movement,  to  mark  progress.  While 
we  try  to  relate  religious  thought  to  the  personal  and 
national  history  of  the  thinkers,  our  main  interest  is  in 
its  development,  and  that  is  not  to  be  recaptured  by  an 
annalistic  method,  even  if  for  years  we  substitute  decades 
or  sometimes  half  centuries.  Later  on  we  shall  have  to 
inquire  as  to  the  way  in  which  this  developing  God  is 
conceived  to  manage  man  and  his  affairs,  to  intervene 
in  history,  and  (most  Greek  idea  of  all)  to  plan,  to 
geometrise,  to  economise,  the  whole  story  of  our  universe 
and  our  race. 

We  have  already  noticed  one  feature  of  the  newer 
conception  of  God,  in  the  elimination  of  the  anthropo- 
morphisms of  older  story  by  the  authors  of  the  Priestly 
Code.  There  are  scholars  who  find  the  same  desire 


THE  JEWS  AFTER  THE  EXILE          257 

shown  by  Septuagint  translators ; 21  by  slight  but  subtle 
alterations  the  adaptation  to  the  Hellenistic  standpoint 
is  made,  and  the  path  becomes  plainer  for  those  who  seek 
to  reconcile  Hebrew  religion  with  Greek  philosophy — 
the  inevitable  outcome  of  the  meeting  of  the  races.  With 
this  impulse  to  obliterate  the  old  naive  notions  of  a  God 
visible  and  .audible,  as  He  walks  in  the  garden,  and  sus- 
ceptible of  feelings  very  like  the  emotions  of  man,  there 
is  a  tendency  to  remove  God  to  a  higher  and  higher  eleva- 
tion, which  makes  relations  with  man  more  difficult. 
There  is  a  loss  of  some  of  that  tenderness  which  Hosea 
portrays  in  God  for  Israel.22  God  must  be  transcendent, 
they  feel.  The  God  of  the  Levitical  cultus  is  a  far-off 
God,  aloof  from  sinful  men,  jealous  in  guarding  His 
holiness; 2S  into  His  holy  place  only  the  priests  may  go, 
and  they  with  precautions;  and  men  become  growingly 
anxious  to  avoid  using  His  name.  Jehovah  is  replaced 
by  Adonai. 

The  distresses  of  the  time  brought  men  face  to.  face 
with  the  problem  of  evil.  God  had  to  be  separate  from 
evil,  and  this  involved  a  dualism  in  religious  belief. 
Slowly  there  grew  up  the  conception  of  a  war  in  the 
spiritual  sphere,  a  war  of  Satan  and  his  hosts  against 
God — a  vivid  and  even  dramatic  way  of  figuring  the  divi- 
sion of  good  and  evil  in  the  universe;  it  acquitted  God 
of  all  responsibility  for  sin  and  suffering. 

But  God  could  not  be  left  out  of  touch  with  the  world, 
and  under  influences  whose  origins  are  looked  for  East- 
ward, Judaism  began  to  develop  angels  and  other  inter- 
mediaries. They  are  found  in  Ezekiel;  while  Daniel 
shows  a  much  later  stage  of  their  growth.  Michael  is 
there  and  other  Princes  presiding  over  the  nation.24  At 

21  W.  Fairweather,  Background  of  Gospels,  339. 

22  J.  P.  Peters,  Rel.  Hebr.,  392-3. 

23  A.  B.  Bruce,  Apologetics.  286. 

24  Cf.  Deut.  LXX  iv.   19,  b;  xxxii.  8,  b. 


258  PROGRESS  IN  RELIGION 

the  end  of  that  century,  the  second  B.C.,  there  are  more 
elaborate  groupings  of  the  angels  in  the  Book  of  Jubilees, 
including  angels  set  over  the  Gentiles  to  lead  them  astray 
from  God  (xv.  31).  In  that  strange  congeries  which 
forms  our  present  book  of  Enoch  there  are  whole 
hierarchies  of  angels.  But,  says  the  author  of  Jubilees 
(xv.  32),  there  is  no  ruler  set  over  Israel;  God  Himself 
is  Israel's  ruler.  In  Tobit2*  we  learn  that  God  hears 
prayers  through  angelic  mediation — a  doctrine  which 
puts  God  very  far  away. 

There  are  noble  conceptions  of  how  God  communicates 
with  men.  His  Glory  is  all  but  personalised.28  His 
Name  becomes  a  reality  in  itself — a  notion  which  reopens 
the  door  to  a  great  deal  of  primitive  magic  which  re- 
ligious thinkers  had  been  driving  gradually  out  of  the 
house  of  Religion.27  But  above  all,  the  most  fertile  of 
all  these  attempts  at  finding  an  intermediary  was  that 
which  chose  God's  Wisdom  for  the  role.  Wisdom  begins 
by  being  an  attribute  of  God;  there  follows  a  poetic 
personification;  and  at  last  Wisdom  becomes  a  divine- 
personality  subordinate  to  God,  distinct  yet  not  distinct 
from  God.  It  receives  a  large  number  of  striking  names 
— Providence,  supreme  Power,  Justice,  Mercy,  and  more 
significant  still,  Holy  Spirit  and  Word.28  Some  Greek 
influence  may  be  suspected  behind  the  last,  so  markedly 
does  it  fit  in  with  the  Stoic  Logos.  But  in  the  meantime 
Wisdom  achieved  all  that  the  Logos  need,  and  it  had  its 
place  in  the  canonical  Proverbs.  Wisdom  and  Logos  ran 
together,  and  enabled  those  who  sought  reconciliation 
between  religion  and  philosophy  to  find  a  way.  The 
identification  had  a  great  history;  it  is  the  basis  of  Philo's 

25  Tobit  xii.  12. 

26  Tobit  xii.    15;  xiii.   14. 

27  Tobit  xiii.    n;   viii.   5. 

28  Fairweather,    Background    of    Gospels,    342;    Wisdom    of    Solomon,    ix.    i, 
Word;    xviii.    15,   Almighty   Word;    ix.    17,   Holy   Spirit;    see   also    Drtunmond, 
Phtto,  i.  p.  214  fir. 


THE  JEWS  AFTER  THE  EXILE          259 

thought;  and  in  the  Fourth  Gospel  it  gained  a  central 
place  in  Christian  Theology.  Something  was  lost  for  the 
time  of  the  Personality  of  God;  for  personality  at  such 
a  distance  and  mediated  through  angels  and  abstract 
nouns  seems  something  less  than  itself.  But  Jehovah 
even  at  a  distance  is  personal.  Judaism  has  kept  what 
Hellenism  had  never  gained,  a  fundamental  conviction 
of  God's  personality;  it  has  cleared  God  of  the  evil  that 
haunted  Greek  conceptions  of  deity;  and,  even  if  the 
device  of  personifying  this  Wisdom  is  clumsy,  it  has  yet 
managed  to  keep  God  in  relation  with  the  world. 


XII 
THE  GODS  OF  THE  ORIENT 

ALEXANDER,  as  we  saw,  made  a  new  world  out  of  an 
old.  He  shifted  the  centre  of  gravity  for  all  things 
human  and  divine,  and  he  gave  men  new  outlooks  and 
new  ideals  in  politics,  thought  and  religion.  The  old 
gods  of  Greece  remained  as  they  had  been ;  which,  when 
everything  was  changed  round  about  them,  meant  that 
they  stood  no  longer  in  the  old  relation  to  life;  that, 
remaining  the  same,  they  too  were  changed.  The  Stoics 
brought  to  bear  upon  human  life,  minds  emancipated 
from  the  local  and  the  temporary;  strong,  clear  intellects 
that  rationalised  all  human  relations  as  well  as  the  divine, 
and  did  it  with  a  swiftness  and  a  thoroughness  that  was 
ruthless  and  really  unscientific.  Everything  was  sub- 
mitted to  reason,  and  had  to  be  quick  in  explaining  itself. 
As  a  result  a  good  many  permanent  features  of  the 
human  mind  were  brushed  away  as  weaknesses.  Perhaps 
in  the  contemporary  expression  of  them  there  was  weak- 
ness; but  even  a  weakness  when  it  is  recurrent,  when  it 
is  virtually  universal,  calls  for  attention  and  explanation. 
A  system  which  is  built  on  the  strength  of  the  human 
mind  to  the  neglect  of  its  weakness,  is  not  destined  for 
permanence.  A  religion  that  is  to  endure  must  recognise 
the  weaknesses  of  men;  it  may  do  so  by  accepting  them 
as  inevitable  and  not  combating  them,  or  it  may  do  so 
by  overcoming  them,  by  bringing  a  force  into  play 
that  outweighs  them.  Stoicism  did  neither;  and  the 
weak,  the  vulgar  and  the  irrational  elements  of  life  mili- 
tated against  it,  and  not  these  alone;  the  natural  affec- 

260 


THE  GODS  OF  THE  ORIENT  261 

tions  which  it  trampled  down  rose  up  again;  they  too 
were  Nature,  and  Stoicism  paid  the  penalty  of  being  in- 
sufficiently loyal  to  its  own  great  principle. 

The  little  states  and  the  loose-hung  hegemonies  of  the 
Greece  best  known  to  literature  were,  as  we  have  seen, 
gone  for  ever.1  City  and  region  alike  were  details  in  one 
or  another  great  empire,  and  were  ruled  by  foreigners, 
the  agents  of  a  great  king  who  perhaps  never  visited 
them  himself.  The  citizen  sank  into  the  subject;  he  was 
driven  in  upon  himself,  to  be  more  individualist  than 
ever.  Whether  he  preferred  the  temporal  or  the  eternal, 
it  was  his  own  affair;  he  must  help  himself. 

If  he  chose  the  temporal,  the  new  age  offered  him  new 
opportunities  of  enjoyment,  unburdened  by  new  ideals  to 
replace  the  old.  The  traditions  of  society  were  changed; 
new  men,  mercenaries  and  traders,  had  wealth  that  made 
the  old  families  look  beggarly ;  and  new  cities  which  the 
Macedonian  princes  planted  all  over  the  Orient  did  much 
to  depopulate  Greece,  and  to  change  what  was  left  of  it. 
The  passing  of  old  standards  in  duty  and  morals,  in 
wealth  and  ideals  of  comfort,  in  the  unrecognised  back- 
grounds of  thought,  gave  the  individual  a  new  freedom; 
the  world  was  all  before  him  where  to  choose.  The  most 
obvious  choice  was  not  the  highest.  One  of  the  inevitable 
consequences  of  the  break-up  of  the  old  society  and  of 
the  enormous  pillage  of  further  Asia  was  a  great  develop- 
ment of  luxury.  Alexander's  zest  for  the  style  and  pomp 
of  the  Persian  court  was  aped  by  his  successors  in  Egypt 
and  Syria;  and  what  in  a  great  nature  was  perhaps  en- 
nobled by  imagination  and  love  of  symbol  became  in  suc- 
cessors of  poorer  grain  rank  vulgarity,  however  cloaked 
by  culture  and  etiquette.  Palaces  full  of  marbles  and 

1 1  do  not  forget  the  weary  wars  that  Polybius  records,  exactly  like  the  wars 
of  the  great  age  of  Greece,  except  that  these  were  formative  and  the  later 
ones  echoes;  then  the  intense  nationalism  had  quickened  the  Greek  mind,  now 
it  simply  wore  it  out. 


262  PROGRESS  IN  RELIGION 

bronzes,  of  mosaics  and  pictures,  of  gold  and  silver  plate; 
great  gardens;  personal  adornment,  flowered  robes  and 
bleached  hair;  famous  cooks;  theatrical  pageants,  parades 
of  strange  beasts;  professional  athletes,  dancers  and 
singers,  organised  in  societies  with  high  privilege  and 
exemption  from  military  service — these  meet  us  in  the 
new  age.  Even  Sparta  succumbed  to  the  taste  for 
luxury.2  Women  gained  a  new  freedom ;  and  as  happens 
with  people  new  to  freedom,  their  use  of  it  was  not 
always  wise  or  helpful  to  the  community.  Men  of  letters 
sank  to  gathering  the  witty  sayings  (not  very  witty)  of 
the  adventuresses  and  hetairai  who  hung  about  prince 
and  parvenu,  and  telling  their  stories  in  the  metre  of 
Sophocles. 

Simultaneously  a  certain  exhaustion  of  the  human 
mind  was  widely  felt.  This  is  a  curious  experience 
which  the  race  has  known  from  time  to  time,  chiefly 
perhaps  when  social  change  is  swifter  than  intellectual 
adjustment.  It  is  not  always  true  that  the  human  mind 
really  is  declining  at  such  periods;  but,  for  the  moment, 
missing  what  is  called  the  "integrity"  of  its  age,  and 
out  of  its  bearings,  it  is  afraid  of  its  great  task  of  crea- 
tion, and,  beating  about  to  find  itself,  it  turns  to  criticism. 
Thinkers,  artists,  and  poets  no  longer  have,  consciously 
or  unconsciously,  with  them  or  in  them  the  sense  of  the 
community,  the  sense  of  humanity,  the  sense  of  the  uni- 
verse, as  the  great  Greeks  had  it — Homer,  Aeschylus, 
and  Plato.  They  are  solitary  except  for  the  past,  the 
great  dead;  and  where  they  do  not  give  themselves  to 
science,  they  are  antiquaries — a  safe  and  happy  trade. 
The  old  is  revived,  reproduced,  interpreted ;  and  attempts 
at  originality  suffer  from  over-consciousness  of  the  great 
triumphs  of  genius  in  the  past  as  much  as  from  the  sense 
of  inadequacy  to  get  any  effective  grasp,  to  achieve  any 

2j.  Beloch,  Griech,  Gesch.,  III.  i.  pp.  415-423. 


THE  GODS  OF  THE  ORIENT  263 

real  synthesis,  of  the  present.  Men  cannot  be  themselves 
in  the  presence  of  the  old  masterpieces;  they  are  driven 
to  emulate  or  to  rebel,  and  neither  course  leads  to  great 
achievement.  So  they  take  refuge  in  the  pretty,  the 
sentimental,  the  small  mastery,  the  art  and  literature  of 
revolt  or  the  clique.  Not  that  the  human  mind  was 
not  inactive  in  this  period;  scholarship,  geography, 
astronomy  and  other  natural  sciences  flourished;  but 
these  did  not  give,  they  never  give,  the  same  sense  of 
freedom  and  grandeur  that  is  received  from  genius  more 
original;  and  without  it  their  flourishing  was  not  to  be 
for  long. 

The  quiet  individual,  then,  revolting  from  the  luxury 
and  display  in  which  the  adventurer  spent  his  new  wealth 
and  gradually  extinguished  his  faculties,  and  conscious 
of  sharing  the  decline  that  was  overtaking  the  world, 
was  faced  by  despair.  The  old  gods  were  not  what  they 
had  been;  philosophy  trampled  on  human  nature;  right 
and  wrong  were  confused;  genius  was  dead;  what  was 
there  worth  while?  There  is  world-weariness  in  this 
age,  weariness  of  culture,3  fear  of  life,  "failure  of  nerve," 
as  Professor  Bury  puts  it.  The  Stoics  ministered  to  the 
relief  of  this  feeling  by  teaching  the  lawfulness  and 
propriety  of  suicide.  True,  Seneca  later  on  urged  that 
"you  should  leave  life,  not  bolt  from  it,"  exire  non 
fugere;  but  the  pace  is  nothing,  the  exit  was  permitted. 
But  a  form  of  surrender  as  fatal  and  requiring  less  re- 
solve, is  race-suicide.  "In  our  time,"  writes  Polybius,* 
"all  Greece  was  visited  by  a  dearth  of  children  .  .  .  and 
a  failure  of  productiveness  followed,  though  there  were 
no  long-continued  wars  or  serious  pestilences  among  us. 
If,  then,  any  one  had  advised  our  sending  to  ask  the  gods 
in  regard  to  this,  what  we  were  to  do  or  say  in  order  to 

8  Wendland,  Die  hell-rani  Kultur,  p.  40. 
4  Polybius,  xxxvii.  9. 


264-  PROGRESS  IN  RELIGION 

become  more  numerous  and  better  fill  our  cities — would 
he  not  have  seemed  a  futile  person,  when  the  cause  was 
manifest  and  the  cure  was  in  our  own  power?  For  this 
evil  grew  upon  us  rapidly,  and  without  attracting  atten- 
tion, by  our  men  becoming  perverted  to  a  passion  for 
show  and  money  and  the  pleasure  of  an  idle  life  and 
accordingly  either  not  marrying  at  all,  or,  if  they  did 
marry,  refusing  to  rear  the  children  that  were  born,  or 
at  most  one  or  two  out  of  a  great  number,  for  the  sake 
of  leaving  them  well  off  or  bringing  them  up  in  extrava- 
gant luxury."  It  sounds  very  modern.  Probably  another 
factor  operated — a  sense  of  despair  of  raising  the  human 
crop  in  a  world  of  war  and  anarchy,  of  the  futility  of 
effort,  the  feeling  that  the  man  travels  best  who  gives 
fewest  pledges  to  fortune.  Again,  the  reaction  will  take 
the  form  of  a  heightened  sense  of  solitude  and  forlorn- 
ness;  and  the  solitary  and  forlorn  are  apt  to  be  the  prey 
of  emotion,  especially  when  the  level  of  culture  is  not 
very  high. 

A  man  must  have  some  anchor,  some  haven  of  peace 
and  security.  If  domestic  happiness  gives  it,  he  is  not 
apt  to  range  much  further.  But  here  was  a  world  where 
all  the  higher  instincts  seemed  to  be  mocked — genius, 
love  of  country,  family  feeling.  One  permanent  instinct 
of  man  was  left  which  was  not  denied,  which  could  not 
be  denied,  its  satisfaction  by  any  combination  of  adven- 
turers. There  was  the  unseen  world,  and  to  it  men 
turned  with  a  hunger  unexampled  in  the  story  of  Greece 
— a  craving  for  something  that  they  might  believe,  for 
some  explanation  of  the  horrors  of  life,  for  some  hope 
that  would  carry  them  through  this  mortal  scene,  through 
the  unchartered  beyond,  for  something  that  would  guar- 
antee family  love  and  natural  affection,  for  something 
universal.  The  Stoic  might  laugh  at  such  desires  in 
another  and  suppress  them  in  himself.  But  natures  that 


THE  GODS  OF  THE  ORIENT  265 

were  of  softer  fibre,  less  logical,  less  courageous,  owned 
to  these  cravings — and  natures,  too,  that  were  truer  to 
the  large  human  instincts.  When  philosophy  gave  so 
little  help,  small  wonder  men  went  elsewhere  in  their 
need. 

The  days  were  past  when  the  enlightened  and  the  in- 
tellectuals dominated  the  field  of  thought.  The  reaction 
was  signalised  by  the  hemlock  given  to  Socrates.  The 
piety  of  Xenophon  is  called  pietism  by  some  German 
critics;  but  whichever  it  be,  his  attitude  to  the  gods 
strikes  strangely  on  a  reader  of  Thucydides  who  remem- 
bers that  the  later  historian  tried  to  finish  the  work  of 
the  earlier.  But  as  in  the  Roman  Empire,  as  in  France 
after  Waterloo,  men,  who  had  been  shocked  by  what 
atheism  could  mean,  swung  back  to  ancient  paths.  The 
successors  of  Alexander  might  be  deified  by  their  own 
rescripts  or  the  votes  of  abject  allies;  but  their  godless 
lives  of  luxury,  licence  and  war  must  have  made  many 
sigh  for  gods  real  and  effectual,  belief  in  whom  would 
control  life  and  lift  it  back  to  the  level  of  an  idealised 
past. 

So,  conscious  of  his  own  needs  and  fears,5  of  his 
spiritual  solitude  in  a  terrible  universe,  the  individual 
man  wanted  friends  whom  he  might  know,  who  would 
care  for  him,  not  as  an  item  in  a  community  but  as  a 
personality.  He  craved  communion,  in  a  new  way,  with 
gods.  Homer's  heroes  had  their  contacts  and  conflicts 
with  gods,  but  not  as  men  now  sought  intercourse  with 
heaven.  The  relation  must  be  more  personal  and  more 
conscious.  Reason  is  one  thing,  feeling  another;  feeling 
was  what  they  wanted.  They  wanted  to  feel  secure,  to 
feel  happy,  to  be  conscious  of  the  touch  and  protection 

5  For  the  fears,  some  of  them,  see  Theophrastus,  Characters,  xxvii.,  The 
Superstitious  Man;  who,  however  often  purified,  confines  himself  to  Greek 
rites — unless  Sabazius  is  still  foreign.  The  book  probably  belongs  between 
322  and  300  B.C.;  cf.  Jebb  (ed.  Sandys),  p.  7. 


266  PROGRESS  IN  RELIGION 

of  gods.  With  the  long  story  of  the  disastrous  effects 
of  unchecked  emotion  upon  religion  open  before  us,  it 
is  easy  to  see  how  this  emphasis  on  feeling  opened  the 
door  to  all  sorts  of  spiritual  and  intellectual  insincerity. 
Men  were  living  under  conditions  which  led  them  to 
despair  of  reason;  the  philosophers  were  so  hard  and  so 
abstract,  and  the  practical  rationalism  of  kings  like 
Philip  V  of  Macedon  led  to  so  much  cold-blooded  horror. 
Probably  feeling  had  never  monopolised  so  much  of 
man's  attention  in  Greek  history. 

The  soul  had  been  drawing  to  itself  the  interest  of 
thinkers  more  and  more  since  the  days  when  Plato 
enunciated  that  philosophy  is  preparation  or  practice  of 
death.6  It  was  an  inevitable  movement  of  thought,  a 
real  progress ;  and  it  illustrates  anew  and  with  force  that 
tendency  to  lay  stress  on  human  personality  which  we 
have  found  so  powerful  in  the  history  of  religion.  More 
and  more  was  asked  of  the  Universe,  was  asked  of  God. 
By  now  Immortality  was  becoming  the  centre  of  religious 
aspiration,  a  natural  outcome  of  the  emphasis  on  the 
individual  enforced  by  all  the  features  of  contemporary 
life.  Something  beyond  the  grave  must  make  amends 
for  this  world.  The  conviction  grows  that  personality 
is  a  thing  that  must  outlast  death;  and  every  man  con- 
scious of  it  has  a  progressively  imperative  instinct  that 
he  at  least  must  not  be  blotted  out.  This  new  self- 
consciousness,  this  new  demand  for  life,  for  fuller  and 
richer  and  more  enduring  life,  distinguishes  this  period 
of  Greek  life  from  the  classical.  Stoic  psychological 
observation,  religious  impulse,  the  cry  for  life  beyond, 
all  bring  the  soul  into  a  new  significance.  The  develop- 
ment of  the  soul  is  to  be  the  real  thing  in  life;  the  body 
and  its  fugitive  interests  may  occupy  the  great  and  the 

6  Plato,  Phaedo,  81  A;  cf.  Rep.,  x.  608  ff.  See  James  Adam,  Vitality  of 
Platonism,  p.  66  f. 


THE  GODS  OF  THE  ORIENT  267 

trivial,  but  for  the  earnest  and  the  thoughtful,  men  or 
women,  the  world  beyond  is  the  real.  The  world  beyond 
and  the  world  within;  for  they  are  the  same  thing.  The 
care  of  the  soul  is  man's  chief  task,  and  it  involves  ques- 
tions. In  the  old  days  any  sense  of  sin  that  there  might 
be  was  concerned  with  acts;  now  it  attaches  itself  to  the 
condition  of  the  soul.  The  soul,  then,  its  sin  fulness  and 
its  purification,  draw  to  themselves  an  attention  which 
would  have  seemed  ludicrous  to  the  illuminated  in  the 
fifth  century  at  Athens,  and  to  the  common  man  too. 
That  marked  shifting  of  interest  from  the  outward  to 
the  inward  which  the  spiritual  interpretation  of  History 
brings  into  such  prominence,7  is  seen  again  here.  Nor 
is  it  accident.  The  trend  of  thought  and  experience  has 
been  steady.  Orphic  teaching,  Pythagoras,  Plato,  the 
pressure  of  the  world  and  its  problems — everything  has 
been  reinforcing  the  necessity  of  this  transition. 

When  once  Immortality  and  the  sense  of  sin  8  become 
master  factors  in  man's  thinking,  a  new  seriousness 
attaches  to  all  religion.  It  ceases  to  be  conventional. 
Ritual  and  tradition  do  well  enough  for  those  who  do 
not  think  and  feel.  The  really  religious  spirit  must  have 
certainty.  The  orthodoxy  of  Aristophanes,  local  and 
conservative  for  all  his  wit,  was  flippant  and  shallow. 
It  was  easy  to  be  orthodox  about  what  did  not  supremely 
matter;  but  for  men  with  an  intense  belief  in  truth  and 
in  God  conventional  orthodoxy  will  not  serve.  Still  less 
will  serve  the  doubts  of  Protagoras  and  the  sophists.  It 
is  a  question  of  where  the  interest  centres,  of  what  mat- 
ters most.  Neither  Aristophanes  nor  Protagoras  seems 
to  have  been  interested  in  his  soul's  salvation. 

The  Epicurean  dismissed  the  whole  matter  and  em- 
phasised the  senses  and  the  life  of  sense.  Cicero's  mag- 

T  See  Shailer   Mathews,   Spiritual  Interpretation  of  History. 

8  It  will  be  remembered  here  that  Sin  is  not  a  term  with  one  fixed  meaning. 


268  PROGRESS  IN  RELIGION 

nificent  refutation  of  Epicureanism  by  citing  tragic 
figures  from  the  dramas  of  Ennius  touched  the  real 
weakness  of  the  system.9 

Now  what  help, 

On  what  protection  may  I  call,  and  win? 
Where  now  in  exile  or  in  flight  find  aid, 
Who  am  bereft  of  citadel  and  home? 
Whither  now  turn,  to  whom  address  my  prayer? 
For  lo !  where  stood  my  home,  my  fathers'  gods 
And  altars  all  are  fallen,  broken  down; 
Their  thrones  by  flame  despoiled;  the  lofty  walls 
Rear  fire-marred  heads,  where  crackling  pine  has  flamed.  .  .  . 

O  father !  O  land  of  my  fathers ! 

O  palace  of  Priam  the  king, 
And  temple,  where  gates  on  high  hinges 

No  more  through  the  silence  shall  ring; 
All  ruined !  and  yet  I  have  seen  you 

When  the  host  of  our  army  stood  nigh 
With  ivory  wrought  and  all  golden, 

A  blaze  of  glory  on  high. 

Andromache  widowed,  childless,  robbed  of  city  and 
home — will  pleasures  of  the  moment,  a  cushion  or  a 
cup  of  mead,  or  the  memory  of  former  cups  and  cushions, 
take  from  her  the  pangs  of  the  soul?  Never!  So 
Epicurean  criticism  fell  on  deaf  ears.  The  Epicurean 
did  not  understand  the  human  problem ;  he  knew  nothing 
of  the  depths  of  human  nature;  and  there  were  those 
who  hinted  that  his  second-hand  natural  science  was  not 
very  sound  and  did  not  go  far  enough.  His  easy  neglect 
of  the  gods  was  well  enough  for  men  who  needed  no 
gods.  But  gods  were  the  prime  demand  of  humanity. 

How  the  Stoic  failed,  we  have  already  seen.  He  too 
missed  the  real  springs  of  the  human  spirit  in  spite  of 
his  psychology;  and  when  he  turned  the  gods  into 

9  Cicero,   Tusculans,   Hi.    19,   44-46;   the   rendering  was  made  by  a  pupil  of 
mine,  who  fell  in  the  war. 


THE  GODS  OF  THE  ORIENT  269 

abstract  personifications  of  grain  or  water  or  of  the 
processes  of  growth,  when  he  included  his  gods  among 
the  other  items  of  the  cosmos  which  would  periodically 
be  dissolved  into  atoms,  and  utterly  annihilated,  he 
showed  how  little  he  understood  the  cry  of  the  human 
heart  He  might  be  loyal  to  truth  and  great  of  spirit, 
but  he  had  missed  something  real. 

The  immortal  mind  craves  objects  that  endure — 

above  all,  its  gods  must  be  real,  they  must  give  the  soul 
fixity  and  certainty ;  and  men  turned  away  in  disappoint- 
ment from  the  Stoics.  Sadness  haunts  Stoicism.  If 
Epictetus  is  conscious  of  no  sadness,  it  marks  a  defect 
in  him;  Seneca  has  an  under-current  of  melancholy, 
and  in  Marcus  Aurelius  it  is  the  dominant  note.  "Either 
gods  or  atoms,"  says  Marcus  Aurelius — a  question-mark 
at  the  very  heart  of  things. 

But  was  it  so  certain  that  real  knowledge  of  the  gods 
was  unattainable?  Men  were,  in  Plato's  telling  phrase, 
"examining  life"  anew  and  getting  closer,  it  seemed,  to 
reality.  Julius  Beloch  suggests  that  the  decline  of  poly- 
theism was  itself  a  symptom  of  the  deepening  of  religious 
feeling.10  Abstracts  of  larger  implication  begin  to  appear 
in  men's  speech ;  TO  Osiov,  "the  divine,"  rules  the  world, 
TO  daijjLoviov,  or  the  bold  vague  masculine  singular, 
o  Oeds,  God,  comes  naturally  to  men's  minds  and  lips. 
Even  Tyche,  chance,  has  at  least  a  grammatical  unity 
about  it,  a  poor  enough  principle  to  which  to  reduce 
phenomena,  but  a  single  one  in  a  sort  of  a  way;  it 
brought  all  things  under  one  idea,  if  a  bad  one.  So  much 
was  the  outcome  of  long  years  of  thought,  filtering  into 
the  regions  of  the  less  original  and  less  thoughtful.  At 
the  bottom,  then,  of  all  phenomena  and  of  all  experience 

10  Beloch,  Griech.  Gesch.,  vol.  III.  i.  444. 


270  PROGRESS  IN  RELIGION 

lies — the  Divine;  and  the  Divine  is  one,  and  so  far  it 
is  intelligible. 

But  if  the  Divine  is  one,  there  is  not  one  Divine  for 
the  Greek  and  another  for  the  Phrygian  and  a  third  for 
the  Egyptian.  No;  Egyptian  and  Greek  and  Phrygian 
are  handling  the  same  evidence,  or  very  nearly  the  same 
evidence,  of  the  same  one  great  underlying  reality.  If 
one  man  says  Zeus  and  another  Osiris,  the  presumption 
is  that  they  are  trying  to  interpret  a  similar  experience. 
When  the  Egyptian  king  in  Herodotus'  story  found  the 
untaught  children  crying  bekos,  and  learnt  that  the 
Phrygians  give  the  name  bekos  to  bread,  he  drew  the 
deduction  that  Phrygian  is  the  oldest,  the  primeval,  lan- 
guage ;  bread  he  took  to  be  a  constant,  however  much  the 
languages  of  men  may  vary.  So  God  is  a  constant;  and 
perhaps,  if  the  older  peoples  give  to  God  a  different  name 
from  the  Greeks,  it  may  be  that  they,  as  the  oldest  ex- 
ponents of  God,  are  not  wrong  but  right,  nearer  the 
original.11  What  if  other  nations,  dealing  with  the  same 
Divine,  coincide  more  nearly  with  the  traditional  re- 
ligions of  Greece  than  with  Stoic  or  Epicurean?  When 
Vincent  of  Lerins  enunciated  his  principle  Quod  semper, 
quod  ubique,  quod  ab  omnibus,  it  was  not  quite  new,  nor 
is  it  yet  quite  obsolete  or  absurd.  The  Stoic,  as  we  saw, 
took  the  consensus  of  human  belief  as  a  valid  index  to 
truth;  the  modern  man  of  science  attaches  more  weight 
to  a  law  deduced  from  observation  over  a  wide  field, 
over  the  widest  field,  by  the  largest  number  of  inde- 
pendent observers.  For  the  different  observers  cancel 
one  another's  errors;  and,  when  they  reach  one  conclu- 
sion, there  is  a  strong  presumption  in  favour  of  our 
acting  upon  it  as  true,  until  it  is  disproved,  or  until  it  is 

11  Compare  the  view  of  Megasthenes  in  the  third  book  of  his  Indica  (cited 
by  Clem.  Alex.,  Strom,  i.  15;  Muller,  F.H.G.,  vol.  ii.  p.  437,  fr.  41):  "All 
that  was  said  abcut  nature  by  the  ancients  is  said  also  by  the  philosophers 
beyond  Greece,  some  of  it  among  the  Indians  by  the  Brabmans,  some  of  it  in 
Syria  by  those  called  Jews." 


THE  GODS  OF  THE  ORIENT  271 

merged  in  some  larger  and  more  universal  law  based  on 
still  wider  knowledge;  and  in  the  latter  case  it  is  really 
confirmed.  The  gods  of  Sicyon  may  not  have  much  cur- 
rency in  Argos,  less  in  Athens,  less  still  in  Thessaly,  none 
at  all  in  Persia;  that  is  to  say,  the  names  given  in  Sicyon 
to  divine  power  may  be  unknown  elsewhere,  but  that  in 
Sicyon  divine  power  is  recognised  and  is  named,  is  a  fact 
that  confirms  and  encourages  other  thinkers  who  else- 
where have  recognised  it,  even  if  they  have  given  it  other 
names.  Conversely,  when  the  man  from  Sicyon  draws 
this  deduction  from  observations  made  in  his  travels  in 
Thessaly  and  Egypt,  even  if  he  thinks  less  of  the  name 
used  in  the  old  home  town,  he  is  confirmed  in  believing 
in  the  Divine. 

When  the  issue  was  put  so,  both  Stoic  and  Epicurean 
admitted  the  validity  of  the  reasoning;  both  conceded 
gods  and  the  existence  of  gods.  The  Epicurean,  how- 
ever, persisted  that  gods  may  exist,  but  that  they  have 
not  necessarily  on  that  account  anything  to  do  with  us; 
Indians  also  existed,  but  they  did  not  come  into  practical 
politics  in  the  Mediterranean  world.  The  Stoic  refused 
this  last  limitation  of  the  gods;  if  gods  exist,  and  the 
consensus  of  mankind  is  fair  evidence  for  presuming  that 
they  do,  then  they  are  relevant  to  us,  in  a  universe  which 
is  an  integer  with  nothing  in  it  that  is,  properly  con- 
sidered, irrelevant  to  anything  else  in  it.  If  the  Stoic, 
like  the  Epicurean,  persisted  in  a  dogma  of  his  own 
about  the  gods,  if  he  grouped  them  among  phenomena 
of  only  temporary  significance,  he  had  at  least  conceded 
— they  had  both  conceded — a  principle  that  was  giving 
important  results.  The  evidence  of  the  foreigner  was 
relevant  to  Greek  theology;  how  far  you  were  to  go  in 
using  it,  was  another  point.  It  might  be  possible  to  use 
the  conceded  principle  to  yield  further  knowledge  and 
bring  men  to  a  firmer  grasp  of  reality. 


272  PROGRESS  IN  RELIGION 

For  centuries  Greeks  had  been  impressed  by  the  East, 
and  especially  by  Egypt.12  Herodotus  had  held  that 
behind  Greek  theology  lay  Egyptian.  He  had  been  in- 
terested in  Persian  thought,  so  far  as  he  could  get  at  it 
through  interpreters.13  The  conquest  of  Alexander  had, 
as  we  have  seen,  brought  Greek  and  Persian  and  Egyp- 
tian together  far  more  closely  than  ever,  and  under  his 
successors  more  deliberate  attempts  than  ever  before 
were  made  to  make  the  religious  ideas  of  the  nations 
intelligible  to  the  Greeks.  The  Ptolemies,  the  shrewdest 
and  most  successful  of  the  world's  rulers,  saw  a  political 
value14  in  bringing  Greek  and  Egyptian  together  on  a 
religious  basis,  for  at  first  blush  the  Greek  had  an  ill- 
disguised  contempt  for  Egyptian  worship.  Herodotus 
had  observed  with  curious  but  kindly  eyes  what  moved 
the  mockery  of  later  Greeks.  People  who  could  really 
worship  cats  and  crocodiles,  sing  hymns  to  them  alive 
and  mummy  them  dead,  who  could  worship  leeks  and 
onions,  were  obviously  contemptible.15  Contempt,  freely 
felt  and  expressed,  rarely  consolidates  kingdoms.  So 
stress  was  laid  on  another  side  of  Egyptian  religion,  and 
the  priests  were  probably  content  with  a  wise  king,  who 
might  modify  detail  but  respected  and  improved  their 
position.  Serapis  became  the  great  Egyptian  god  for 
mankind  at  large.  It  was  a  cult  fortified  by  the  rejection 
or  modification  of  gross  or  repugnant  elements  and  by 
new  emphasis  on  its  mystical  features.  In  other  words, 
it  was  Hellenised;  it  became  "the  most  civilised  of  all 
barbarian  religions;  it  retained  enough  of  the  exotic 
element  to  arouse  the  curiosity  of  the  Greeks,  but  not 
enough  to  offend  their  delicate  sense  of  proportion,  and 

12  Breasted,   Hist.    Anc.   Egyptians,    p.    40,    says   that  the   Greeks   never  _  cor- 
rectly understood   Egyptian    civilisation,  and   greatly   over-valued   Egypt's   intel- 
lectual  achievement:    the    Greeks   were   vastly   superior   to   what   they    so   much 
venerated. 

13  See  p.  T64. 

14  Cf.   Mahaffy,  Empire   of  Ptolemies,  p.  72. 
16  Cumont,   Oriental  Religions,  p.   78. 


THE  GODS  OF  THE  ORIENT  273 

its  success  was  remarkable."  16  The  Athenian  sculptor 
Bryaxis  gave  the  new  or  re-discovered  god  a  form  which 
Cumont ir  calls  "one  of  the  last  divine  creations  of 
Hellenic  genius" ;  it  became  the  standard  and  the  proto- 
type of  all  portrayals  of  him. 

Political  attempts,  like  this  of  the  first  Ptolemy,  are 
significant  only  when  they  are  based  on  some  real  factor 
of  the  day;  and  in  this  case  the  real  factor  was  a  genuine 
desire  for  approximation  in  religion.  Manetho,  a  priest 
of  Heliopolis,  who  is  credited  with  a  share  in  leading 
Ptolemy  to  this  development  of  Serapis,18  took  the 
trouble  to  compile  for  Greeks  an  account  of  Egyptian 
religion.  Even  if  his  work,  as  we  are  told,  was  careless 
and  uncritical,19  and  tedious  into  the  bargain,20  so  that 
the  Greeks  left  it  on  one  side  in  favour  of  still  less  exact 
and  exacting  writers,  it  was  a  sign  of  the  movement  of 
interest.  The  king  and  the  priest  had  hit  the  moment; 
and  the  Hellenised  religion  of  Serapis  was  spread 
through  the  ramifications  of  trade  all  over  the  world 
before  the  century  was  out.21  The  god  had  Greek  monks 
devoted  to  him  as  well  as  Egyptian,  and  recent  finds  of 
papyri  tell  of  the  life  in  his  Serapeums.  If  much  of 
Egyptian  religion  remained  un-Hellenised,  a  contact  had 
been  established  which  produced  the  greatest  effects. 

In  the  same  way,  in  this  period,  the  Chaldean  priest 
Berossos,  under  Antiochus  Soter,  wrote  in  Greek  a  short 
history  of  Babylonia  on  the  basis  of  cuneiform  tradition, 
setting  forth  in  dry  enough  fashion  a  list  of  kings  reach- 
ing back  to  468,000  years  before  Cyrus,  and  adding 
mythological  and  astrological  sections.  If  the  vast  an- 
tiquity of  the  East  could  guarantee  the  eternity  of  the 

18  Cumont,   Oriental  Religions,  p.   79. 

17  Ib.,   p.    76. 

18  Plutarch,  Isis  and  Osiris,  c.  28. 

19  Breasted,    Hist,   of  Ancient  Egyptians,  p.   26;   Erman,   Egyptian  Religion, 
p.  217,  calls  it  "a  melancholy  piece  of  bungling." 

20  Beloch,  Greich.  Gesch.,  III.  i.  489. 

21  Beloch,  Greich.  Gesch.,  III.  i.  pp.  446-449. 


274  PROGRESS  IN  RELIGION 

gods  of  the  Orient,  surely  Berossos  had  done  good 
service;  but  it  is  not  surprising  to  learn  that  he  too  was 
little  read.22 

Asia  Minor  lay  still  nearer  to  the  Greek,  and  it  was 
familiar  ground,  and  for  a  long  time  influences  had  been 
felt  from  here.  The  kings  of  Pergamum,  another  very 
astute  dynasty,  transferred  to  their  capital  the  great  black 
stone  which  either  was  Cybele  or  was  her  dwelling,  and 
so  doing  they  gave  and  gained  a  new  significance. 
Athens  and  Rome  at  once  became  more  attentive  to  the 
goddess.23  The  Seleucids,  on  the  other  hand,  tried  to 
establish  Greek  cults  and  festivals  in  Syria.  What  re- 
sponse their  efforts  met  among  the  Jews,  we  know ;  how 
their  other  subjects  received  them,  is  not  so  well  known. 
On  the  other  hand,  Syria  had  long  ago  sent  Adonis  to 
Greece  and  now  began  to  contribute  other  gods — 
Atargatis,  who  became  identified  in  the  spirit  of  the 
times  with  Astarte,24  and  Adad  or  Hadad,  who  had  a 
bookish  celebrity  through  the  similarity  of  his  name  with 
the  Syriac  word  for  one.26 

In  all  this  story  we  have  to  remember  that  we  are  not 
dealing  with  monotheists  and  their  fierce  temper  and 
exacting  Theology,  but  with  polytheists  easier  of  habit 
altogether.  It  was  not  hard  to  identify  one's  native  god 
with  the  foreigner's  god;  it  was  just  as  easy  to  worship 
both.  Gods  were  taken  over  as  lightly  then  as  religious 
ideas  are  from  popular  magazines  to-day.  Indeed  the 
mood  of  vague  catholicity  and  loose  thinking  that  has 
made  the  success  of  theosophy  in  India  and  in  America 
was  not  strange  to  that  age.  It  is  not  to  be  supposed 
that  the  pious  and  the  superstitious,  the  austere  and  the 
prostitute,  who  worshipped  Isis  side  by  side,  had  any 

22  Beloch,  Greich.  Gesch.,  p.  489. 

23  W.  S.  Ferguson,  Hellenistic  Athens,  p.  229. 

24  Cumont,  Ar.   Relig.,  p.   104,  suggests  that  the  identification  is  wrong. 

25  Macrobius,    Saturnalia,    i.    23,    17;    Adad  .  .  .  Ejus   nominis    interpretatio 
significat  Unus  unus. 


THE  GODS  OF  THE  ORIENT  275 

exact  knowledge  of  all  of  the  history  of  the  goddess. 
The  literature  of  the  foreigner  remained  a  sealed  book 
to  the  Greek;  he  did  not  want  to  read  what  barbarians 
wrote;  he  picked  up  a  journalist's  knowledge  of  their 
ideas,  and  filled  the  gaps  in  his  information  with  guess- 
work.26 The  philosophers  smiled  benignly  on  the  result 
and  treated  the  religions  of  the  Orient  as  "philosophies." 

For  our  present  inquiry  the  grounds  of  appeal  of  these 
barbarian  religions  are  more  important  than  the  cults 
themselves.  We  have  to  consider  what  the  Greeks  and 
others  supposed  themselves  to  find  in  them;  and  then  to 
see  how  the  evidence  we  gain  bears  upon  our  subject. 

We  have  seen  that  the  immense  antiquity  of  these 
Eastern  religions  had  always  impressed  the  Greek,  and 
that  a  feeling,  not  at  all  improper,  existed  that  truth  was 
to  be  sought  even  outside  the  Greek  philosophic  schools. 
As  Celsus  said  long  afterwards — the  saying  will  bear 
repetition — "the  barbarians  are  equal  to  discovering  re- 
ligious truths  (dogmata}  while  the  Greeks  are  better  at 
criticising  and  establishing  them  when  discovered." " 
But  that  was  only  one  line  of  appeal;  for,  quite  apart 
from  the  quest  for  truth,  there  was  an  appeal  to  imagina- 
tion and  to  emotion  in  the  ancient  ceremonial,  in  the 
claim  to  superior  and  esoteric  knowledge,  in  the  promise 
of  the  communication  of  new  life  in  the  mysteries. 
Where  religion  and  magic  are  not  clearly  distinguished, 
there  is  an  additional  appeal  in  ritual.  A'  later  age  gave 
a  "scientific"  account  of  the  value  of  ritual  as  Mrs. 
Besant  does  in  India  to-day.  There  are  affinities  almost 
chemical  between  spiritual  natures  and  material  sub- 
stances ; 28  the  physical  nature  of  matter  can  be  modified 
or  supercharged  by  formulae;  or,  at  least,  you  can  be- 
lieve that  some  such  processes  and  contacts  may  be  pos- 
se Wendland,  die  hell.-rom  Kultur,  p.  39;  Beloch,  Greich.  Gesch.,  III.  488. 

27  Ap.  Origen,  c.  Cels.,  i.  2.     Cf.  p.  342. 

28  Cf.  p.  336. 


276  PROGRESS  IN  RELIGION 

sible;  and  then  what  prospects  open  before  the  wor- 
shipper of  rapture,  of  vision,  and,  above  all,  of  feel- 
ing! 

There  was  in  the  Eastern  religions  no  great  moral 
teaching,  any  more  than  in  the  religion  of  the  Greek 
temples;  that  was  never  a  feature  of  ancient  paganism; 
morals,  on  the  contrary,  as  we  saw,  came  from  the  phi- 
losophers and  the  fathers  of  families.  But  Egyptian 
religion  had  much  to  give  to  the  mind — the  sensation 
of  exercise,  for  instance,  and  the  impression  of  receiving 
truth.  Its  linen,  its  tonsures,  and  its  rites  of  washing- 
rites  easy,  natural,  and  refreshing  in  a  hot  climate  with 
a  great  river  always  near — gave  the  suggestion  of 
purity.29  Its  occasional  taboos  of  sexual  intercourse,  its 
daily  ministry  to  the  gods  30  (closely  resembling  Hindu 
practice),  the  unity,  precision,  and  eternity  of  its  cere- 
mony, all  suggested  a  seriousness,  which  to  loose-thinking 
minds,  careless  of  the  distinction  between  symbol  and 
thought,  was  impressive  in  the  highest.  We  know  to 
this  day  the  appeal  of  "holiness,"  in  spite  of  wrong  or 
confused  thinking  that  may  go  with  it.  The  teaching  of 
judgment  after  death  and  the  promise  of  salvation  by 
Serapis,31  the  claim  to  control  gods  or  cosmic  powers  by 
prayer  and  holy  formula,32  seemed  to  take  the  worshipper 
into  regions  beyond  common  experience,  to  promise  him 
what  was  above  all  the  desire  of  men  in  that  age  of 
trouble  and  uncertainty — assurance  and  certainty.  If 
questions  were  raised  about  gross  traditions  and  rituals, 
about  worship  of  lowly  reptiles,  recourse  was  had  to 
allegory  and  symbol.  If,  says  Plutarch,  a  god  is  content 
to  be  worshipped  in  an  idol,  how  much  happier  is  it  to 

29  Cumont,   Or.  Relig.,  pp.  91,   92. 

80  Cumont,  Or.  Relig.,  pp.  95,  97,  cites  Porphyry,  de  Abstin.,  iv.  9;  Anrobius, 
'Vii.  32;  Apuleius,  Metatn.,  xi.  20. 

31  Julian,  Oration,  iv.    136  A,   B. 

32  Cf.  the  theory  advanced  by  lamblichus,  vi.  6. 


THE  GODS  OF  THE  ORIENT  277 

symbolise  him  in  a  living  thing! — e.g.  a  crocodile,  which 
like  God  has  no  tongue.33 

Side  by  side  with  Eastern  religion  came  Astrology. 
Professor  Burnet  and  Cumont  alike  urge  that  the  much 
vaunted  Astronomy  of  Babylonia  was  empirical — "an 
elaborate  record  of  celestial  phenomena  made  for  pur- 
poses of  divination."  34  This  was  not  the  view  of  the 
Greeks.  Diodorus  Siculus  (ii.  29,  30)  contrasts  the 
flimsy  amateurish  way  in  which  the  Greeks  handle  the 
science,  "touching  the  philosophy  late,  studying  it  up  to 
a  point,  distracted  by  the  needs  of  life  .  .  .  making  a 
trade  of  it  for  gain,"  with  the  serious  training  of  the 
hereditary  Chaldaean  astrologers,  who  are  the  descend- 
ants or  heirs  of  the  most  ancient  Babylonians,  who  have 
the  most  accurate  observations  of  the  movements  and 
influences  of  the  stars.35  The  planets  they  call  "inter- 
preters," because  they  move  and  foreshow  the  future  and 
interpret  to  men  the  goodwill  of  the  gods,  and  they  name 
them  "as  our  astrologers  do"  after  the  gods  Ares,  Aphro- 
dite, Hermes,  and  Zeus,  though  Cronos  (or  Saturn) 
they  call  Helios.  Greek  astrologers  had  not  always  used 
these  names;  the  planets  had  been  Pyroeis,  Eosphoros, 
Stilbon,  and  Phaethon,  and  Saturn  had  been  Phaenion, 
until  in  the  fourth  century  B.C.  the  divine  names  replaced 
the  old  ones.36  The  planet  week  came  into  use  in  Hel- 
lenistic times.87  The  philosophers  had  started  the  idea 
that  the  stars  were  gods;  Aristophanes  had  remarked 
that  the  Orientals  worshipped  the  Sun  and  the  Moon. 
With  the  breakdown  of  old  local  gods,  the  deification  of 
adventurer  princes,  and  the  theory  of  Euhemerus  that 

33  Plutarch,   I  sis  and   Osiris,    75,   381    B.      Cf.    Strabo,   xvii.    38,   c.    812,   on 
worship  of   sacred  crocodile. 

34  Burnet,  Greek  Philosophy,  Part  I.  p.   5.     Cumont,  Astrology  and  Religion, 
pp.   7,  8. 

35  Cf.    Strabo,  p.   639   C,   on   Chaldean  astronomers,  especially  Kidenas,  iden- 
tified now  with   Ki-din-nu   read   on  a  lunar  table;   Cumont,   iv.  63,  64. 

36  Cumont,   Astral,   and   Relig.,   pp.   45,   46;    Dreyer,   Planetary   Systems,   p. 
169  n. 

37  Cumont,  Astral,  and  Relig.,  p.   165. 


278  PROGRESS  IN  RELIGION 

all  the  Greek  gods  were  deified  men,  a  place  was  open,  as 
we  saw,  for  gods  who  were  universal  and  unquestion- 
able, who  did  not  depend  on  popular  votes  for  their  god- 
head; and  Astrology  offered  them.  It  is  pointed  out 
that  Astronomy  only  reached  Egypt  itself  about  the  sixth 
century  B.C.,  from  which  time  its  significance  increased 
rapidly  and  the  Egyptians  began  to  claim  the  credit  of 
being  the  pioneers  in  the  Science.88  On  the  Hellenistic 
mind,  Astrology  fell,  as  Professor  Murray  puts  it,  "as  a 
new  disease  falls  upon  some  remote  island  people." 

Once  the  identification  of  stars  and  gods  was  made, 
the  door  was  open  for  much  more.  To  a  certain  type 
of  mind,  when  it  is  explained  that  the  gods  are  the  stars 
and  the  stars  the  gods,  a  new  certainty  seems  to  follow; 
religion  reaches  a  new  plane  of  truth  and  eternity,  and  all 
sorts  of  riders  and  deductions  follow.40  The  planets  began 
to  have  influences,  to  be  tutelary  powers  of  days,  hours, 
and  centuries,  to  be  "world-lords"  (KOffjtoKpaTope?) ; 
to  each  were  attached  plants,  metals,  stones,  and  colours. 
The  sun  becomes  "the  heart  of  the  universe."  Lest  it 
should  seem  that  the  creature  replaced  the  creator,  the 
new  theologians  devised  a  god  beyond  the  sun,  to  whom 
the  sun  was  a  subordinate  power,  of  whom  it  was  an  ex- 
pression in  the  world  of  sense,  a  Jupiter  summus  exsuper- 
antissimus.  Then  as  life  came  more  under  planetary 
control,  the  planets  became  gates 41  through  which  the 
soul  passes  in  descent  to  earth  and  again  in  ascent  to  the 
world  of  being,  at  each  of  which  it  picks  up  or  lays  down 
qualities — e.g.  from  Mars  it  gets  anger,  from  Venus  de- 
sire; or,  it  may  be,  the  soul  loses  some  aspect  of  real  be- 
ing with  each  gate  through  which  it  passes.42  Stoic  pan- 
theism fitted  in  well  with  all  this;  and  if  the  stars  too 

38  Cumont,  Astro!,  and  Relig.,  p.  75. 

39  Murray,  Four  Stages,   p.    125. 

40  Cumont,  Astral,  and  Relig.,  pp.   119-131,   135. 

41  Cumont,   Astral,  and  Relig.,  p.    198;    Oriental  Religions,  p.   269  n. 

42  Macrobius,   Comm.  Somn.  Scip.,  i.,  xi.  9,  xii.   i. 


THE  GODS  OF  THE  ORIENT  279 

were  to  pass,  as  stricter  Stoics  would  urge,  they  had  at 
least  a  look  of  eternity  that  might  encourage  the  believer 
to  hope  that  things  were  not  so  bad  as  was  said. 

Not  everybody  accepted  this  new  revelation.  A'ris- 
tarchos  of  Samos  taught  of  a  heliocentric  system,  "up- 
setting the  hearth  (hestia)  of  the  universe."  43  Seleucus 
of  Seleucia,  a  rationalist  indeed,  is  credited  with  utterly 
rejecting  astrology,  with  holding  to  the  heliocentric  idea, 
and  offering  an  explanation  of  tides.4*  But  such  men 
were  a  minority ;  they  differed  so  strongly  from  current 
opinion  that  they  could  not  be  right,  and  they  unsettled 
what  was  becoming  the  fixed  basis  in  religion.  When  we 
recall  how  in  modern  times  of  unsettlement  there  has 
been  passionate  return  to  common  consent,  to  tradition, 
as  the  sure  foundation  of  religious  life,  we  can  under- 
stand in  measure  the  attitude  of  the  Hellenistic  world. 
No  real  reaction  was  made  against  Astrology  till  Chris- 
tians, orthodox  and  unorthodox,46  began  to  turn  their 
criticism  on  it;  and  the  fierceness  of  the  struggle  then 
shows  what  was  involved.  The  certainty  of  the  old  re- 
ligion had  in  Astrology  what  we  should  call  a  scientific 
basis;  the  order  of  the  heavens,  the  uniformity  and  in- 
telligibility of  the  cosmos,  were  linked  by  pure  assump- 
tion to  a  traditional  religion.  The  weakness  of  the  link 
escaped  notice  in  the  relief  of  finding  certainty,  and  the 
certainty  itself  was  not  too  closely  examined.  The  Greek 
passion  for  knowledge  was  cheaply  gratified,  and  the 
clinging  soul  was  given  a  sure  support.  And  the  rest 
followed. 

Of  the  stages  by  which  the  various  religions  conquered 
the  world,  or  of  the  detail  of  teaching  and  cults,  it  is  not 

43  Beloch,  Gr.  Gesch.,  III.  i.  480;  Dreyer,  Planetary  Systems,  p.   136  f.;  the 
criticism  quoted  is  Plutarch's  and  very  characteristic,  de  facie  in  orbe  lunce.  6. 

44  Dreyer,  ibid.,  p.  140;  Strabo,  cc.  6,  739,  and  especially  c.   174. 

45  E.g.   Bardaisan's  book  on  Fate. 


280  PROGRESS  IN  RELIGION 

necessary  now  to  speak,  except  as  they  bear  upon  our 
general  inquiry. 

First  of  all,  the  individual  is  promised  a  surer  recog- 
nition by  the  gods.  The  meaning  of  all  that  ancient 
wealth  of  ceremony  was  again  and  again  a  real  contact 
between  God  and  man.  Symbol  as  much  of  it  was,  sym- 
bol and  transaction  ran  into  one  another,  where  (as  we 
saw)  magic  and  religion  were  insufficiently  distinguished, 
where  thought  was  not  alert,  and  where  the  quest  of  truth 
was  not  the  main  object.  God  and  man  could  meet  and 
know  each  other ;  mystically  or  even  to  the  bodily  eye  god 
and  goddess  \7ould  show  themselves  to  the  faithful,  who, 
duly  purified,  performed  aright  the  set  course  of  ritual, 
and  in  the  appointed  way  was  initiated  and  prepared. 
The  very  difficulty  of  initiation,  the  seven  grades  through 
which  the  Mithraist  was  conducted,  the  strangeness,  all 
heightened  the  impression,  and  where  criticism  or  reflec- 
tion was  impiety,  brought  conviction  to  the  adept.  Of 
the  processes  of  mind  by  which  certainty  was  achieved, 
of  deliberate  imposture  and  conjuring  by  the  priests,  of 
suggestion  and  suggestibility,  of  the  will  to  believe,  of 
the  desperation  of  the  religious  temperament  in  the  world 
we  have  been  surveying,  much  might  be  said.  But  for 
us  the  main  point  is  this:  in  all  the  mental  and  moral 
degradation  of  these  Eastern  religions,  as  they  spread 
over  the  Mediterranean  world,  the  factor  of  importance 
is  the  conviction  that  man,  as  an  individual,  as  a  person- 
ality, with  real  needs  of  soul  and  nature,  must  have  an 
effective  relation  with  god,  gods,  or  goddesses,  a  great 
reassertion,  in  a  terribly  misleading  and  humiliating  way, 
of  the  principle  which  we  have  found  throughout — the 
growing  significance  of  the  individual  and  the  imperative 
call  for  his  recognition  by  the  Divine. 

When  we  analyse  further  the  objects  of  these  initia- 
tions, we  get  still  clearer  light  on  this  point.  The  word 


THE  GODS  OF  THE  ORIENT  281 

"salvation"  begins  to  appear  in  religion.  How  alien, 
how  unintelligible,  to  Homer's  Greeks  the  word  would 
have  been,  it  is  hard  to  imagine.  In  the  age  of  Pericles 
and  Anaxagoras  it  would  have  been  strange.  But  in  the 
period  before  us,  it  becomes  a  keyword  in  religious 
thought.  A  careless  assumption  puts  on  one  level  all 
ancient  religions  which  speak  of  salvation;  but  the  word 
obviously  is  susceptible  of  many  meanings,  which  will 
vary  with  the  outlook  of  the  speaker. 

Salvation  is  not  a  fixed  idea;  much  turns  on  what  it 
is  from  which  a  man  seeks  to  be  saved — whether  he  fears 
eternal  reincarnation,  or  death  physical  or  eternal,  or 
the  pollution  and  paralysis  of  his  soul  by  sin. 

In  the  age  under  our  study  men  sought  salvation  from 
three  main  fears — from  daemons,  from  fate,  and  from 
death.  The  planet  "world-lords"  had  done  more  than 
establish  religion;  they  had  brought  all  life  under  their 
iron  rule.  Fatalism  began  to  paralyse  the  thoughts  of 
men;  a  doom,  a  destiny,  was  read  in  the  stars,  and  it 
was  at  once  inevitable;  the  very  belief  in  it  made  it  so, 
and  life  became  a  thing  of  horror  and  dread.  Was  it 
possible  to  break  the  bars?  India  has  seen  a  similar  en- 
deavour to  escape  from  the  pitiless  law  of  Karma,  with 
its  menace  of  eight  million  rebirths  into  the  world  of 
sense  till  all  consequences  of  all  acts  are  worked  off  to 
the  utmost ;  by  Bhakti,  or  union  with  a  god,  it  is  taught, 
a  man  may  be  "carried  across  the  stream  of  the  world." 
The  recrudescence  of  old  superstitions  and  the  invasion 
of  new  ones  from  the  East  had  filled  the  minds  of  men 
and  women  with  heightened  fears  of  daemons.  Once 
the  outlook  of  the  day  was  accepted,  the  consensus  of 
mankind  was  in  favour  of  belief  in  a  "world  all  devils 
o'er";  and  magic  and  religion  gained  a  new  value  as 
means  of  protection  against  the  terrors  of  the  spirit 
world.  It  is  not  easy  to  understand,  apart  from  the  evi- 


282  PROGRESS  IN  RELIGION 

dence,  the  lengths  to  which  terror  can  carry  men  and 
women;  but  Cicero  and  Plutarch  and  even  Horace  give 
us  material  for  a  judgment,  which  is  supported  by  testi- 
mony painfully  similar  from  the  animistic  peoples  of 
to-day. 

Tempers  more  strictly  religious  turned  to  the  gods 
and  to  the  initiations,  which  linked  men  with  them,  for 
something  higher.  The  soul  they  came  to  think  of  as  a 
prisoner  in  the  body — an  idea  borrowed  from  the  Or- 
phics  by  Plato ;  and  they  went  to  the  gods  for  assurance 
of  immortality.  The  creature's  blind  dread  of  extinction 
was  one  factor  in  this  impulse,  but  surely  with  the  growth 
of  the  sense  of  individuality  we  may  recognise  a  nobler 
strain  too.  All  the  travail  of  all  the  world  to  produce  a 
creature  born  to  reach  strange  heights  of  being — and  to 
be  extinguished!  No,  that  must  not  be;  the  gods  must 
have  other  purposes ;  so  to  the  gods  men  went  for  deliv- 
erance. Another  motive,  not  wholly  disentangled  from 
strange  antecedents  of  taboo,  was  a  consciousness  of  sin 
and  moral  weakness.  The  forgiveness  of  sins  was  not 
a  gospel  to  appeal  at  once  to  a  world  unconscious  of  sin. 
Introspection,  self-criticism,  was  a  regular  part  of  the 
Stoic  management  of  life;  but  there  were  men  who  did 
not  forgive  themselves  their  sins  with  the  resolute  phlegm 
of  some  of  the  Stoics.  It  is  clear  from  our  evidence  that 
not  all  men  conceived  of  sin  as  spiritual;  there  were  many 
crude  and  immature  thoughts  upon  it,  and  men  had  much 
to  learn  here  from  Jesus  of  Nazareth.  But  the  whiter 
souls,  it  is  fair  to  hold,  were  turning  to  shrine  and  temple 
for  spiritual  help  in  the  mending  of  life  and  the  cleansing 
of  conscience. 

Thus,  in  one  way  and  another,  men  were  led  to  think 
of  salvation  and  to  expect  it  from  the  gods.  The  Stoic 
might  tell  them  to  save  themselves,  might  question  them 
as  to  the  use  of  prayer,  might  set  them  a  great  example 


THE  GODS  OF  THE  ORIENT  283 

of  a  self-contained,  high-minded  life.  But  in  the  break- 
down of  society,  amid  the  crumbling  of  ideals  and  the 
failure  of  the  old  gods,  the  human  heart  was  still  reaching 
out  for  a  religion  that  made  it  sure  of  three  things — of 
the  reality  of  human  personality,  of  some  fundamental 
righteousness  in  the  universe  as  the  basis  of  all  transac- 
tions, human  and  eternal,  and  of  God. 

Whatever  criticism  has  to  be  passed  upon  the  develop- 
ments of  religion  in  the  Hellenistic  world,  and  criticism 
there  must  be  on  many  scores — cowardice  in  the  facing  of 
facts,  a  defective  sense  of  truth,  sentimentalism,  shallow- 
ness,  and  so  forth — it  remains  that  even  this  phase  of 
human  history  bears  witness  to  great  instincts. 


XIII 

ROMAN  RELIGION 

IN  studying  Greek  and  Hebrew  religion  we  have  to  deal 
with  peoples  who  did  their  own  thinking.  From  first 
to  last,  whatever  foreign  elements  are  added  by  bar- 
barians "more  skilled  to  discover  religious  truths  (dog- 
mata) than  to  develop  them,"  the  Greek  world  thought 
on  its  own  lines,  even  when  it  fell  shortest  of  its  own 
standards.  The  Hebrew  was  influenced  by  his  neigh- 
bours, friends  or  enemies,  and  found  his  religious  ideas 
modified  in  one  way  and  another  by  the  peoples  he  met, 
above  all  by  the  Greek.  But  the  story  of  Roman  religion 
is  very  different.  The  oldest  religious  ideas  of  the  Ro- 
man people,  so  far  as  we  can  lay  hold  of  them  and  speak 
of  them,  continue  to  the  end — down  to  the  final  victory 
of  Christianity,  and,  it  is  possible  to  add,  after  it.  The 
affair  of  the  Altar  of  Victory  at  the  end  of  the  fourth 
century  A.D.  cannot  be  called  political;  to  call  it  religious 
would  need  explanation.  A  group  of  nobles  representing 
a  very  ancient  past,  a  past  far  more  ancient  than  the 
records  of  their  own  families,  make  it  a  point  of  religion 
to  retain  an  antique  ritual,  a  worship  of  Victory;  but 
we  know  from  other  sources  that  at  the  same  time  what 
we  should  call  their  religious  life  moved  about  cults  and 
ideas  that  were  originally  not  Roman  at  all.  For  six 
hundred  years,  if  we  take  the  date  given  us  by  a  Roman 
poet  for  the  arrival  of  "the  Muse  with  winged  foot," 
the  same  confusion  exists  in  Roman  religion;  the  old 
persists,  maintained  by  superstition,  by  sentiment  and  tra- 

1  See  p.  290. 

284 


ROMAN  RELIGION  285 

dition,  but  what  real  or  spiritual  ideas  are  attached  to  it, 
it  is  impossible  to  be  certain.  Native  Roman  religion  be- 
came atrophied,  failed  to  develop,  perished  in  fact;  but 
a  Roman  would  have  spoken  otherwise,  and  would  have 
maintained  that  it  continued. 

The  phenomena  is  not  by  now  a  strange  one.  In  Cen- 
tral Africa  the  negro  becomes  Muhammadan  and  re- 
pudiates his  old  religion,  however  many  ideas  he  carries 
over  to  corrupt  the  faith  of  Islam.  In  the  South  Seas 
in  island  after  island  the  old  heathenism  has  utterly  dis- 
appeared, as  it  has  among  American  negroes;  what  sur- 
vives is  not  religion,  it  is  magic  now,  hardly  even  super- 
stition. The  fact  is  that  primitive  religion  cannot  main- 
tain itself  against  the  thought  and  faith  of  races  that 
have  progressed.  In  spite  of  Miss  Harrison's  enthusiasm 
for  cosy  and  delightful  gods  without  personality,  man- 
kind has  never  been  able  to  maintain  them  against  per- 
sonal gods,  except  in  a  vague  helpless  way,  in  fear  and 
confusion  of  mind ;  they  prove  unthinkable,  and  mankind 
insists  on  religion  being  thinkable.  Where  such  old  forms 
of  religion  meet  Monotheism,  they  perish  utterly,  either 
by  direct  repudiation  as  in  the  cases  just  given,  or  are 
transformed  as  far  as  possible  by  philosophy  and  mysti- 
cism, as  the  religions  of  the  Roman  Empire  were,  or  as 
Hinduism  to-day  is  being  slowly  driven  into  non-entity 
by  its  apologists.  The  Roman,  in  his  great  career  as 
conqueror,  lawyer  and  ruler,  early  met  the  Greek,  and, 
in  reality,  very  quickly  saw  that  in  all  that  bears  upon 
religion  and  philosophy  the  Greek  was  on  a  higher  plane 
than  himself.  He  moved  over  to  that  higher  plane,  and 
the  problem  now  was  what  to  make  of  the  traditional  re- 
ligion of  his  fathers.  He  maintained  many  of  the  old 
forms.  Some  family  cults  lapsed  altogether;  in  others 
when  once  the  formal  procedure  was  accomplished,  no 
further  attention  was  paid  to  god  or  cult.  Where  god  and 


286  PROGRESS  IN  RELIGION 

cult  received  the  compliment  of  thought,  the  problem  was 
what  meaning  or  value  to  attach  to  them  at  all. 

Jewish  reliigon  kept  festivals  which  belonged  to  an 
earlier  stage  of  civilisation  and  society,  transforming 
them  as  best  it  could.  Roman  religion  had  the  same  prob- 
lem. Agriculture  is  not  very  strictly  tied  to  the  calendar, 
especially  when  the  calendar  is  inaccurate.  But  festivals, 
once  given  a  fixed  place  in  the  calendar,  keep  it.  Rome 
ceased  to  be  pre-eminently  an  agricultural  society ;  and  as 
the  festivals,  through  the  vagaries  of  calendar-making, 
were  less  and  less  recognisable  as  agricultural,  while  the 
people  who  kept  them  were  more  and  more  out  of  touch 
with  their  own  origins,  less  and  less  meaning  came  to  be 
attachable  to  the  old  religious  usages.  The  gods  of  the 
country-side  hardly  fitted  into  urban  life.  Even  great 
antiquaries  like  Varro  were  often  unable  to  explain  what 
the  ceremonies  meant.  Some  of  them  took  on  new  mean- 
ings. Whatever  the  Saturnalia  had  been,  it  came  to  be  a 
midwinter  holiday  for  townspeople  and  their  slaves.2 

And  what  were  the  old  gods?  Here  is  what  Aust, 
translated  and  endorsed  by  Dr.  Warde  Fowler,  says  of 
them :  "The  deities  of  Rome  were  deities  of  the  cult  only. 
They  had  no  human  form ;  they  had  not  the  human  heart 
with  its  virtues  and  vices.  They  had  no  intercourse  with 
each  other,  and  no  common  or  permanent  residence ;  they 
enjoyed  no  nectar  and  ambrosia  .  .  .  they  had  no  chil- 
dren, no  parental  relations.  They  were  indeed  both  male 
and  female,  and  a  male  and  female  deity  are  often  in 
close  relations  with  each  other;  but  this  is  not  a  relation 
of  marriage  and  rests  only  on  a  similarity  in  the  sphere 
of  their  operations.  .  .  .  These  deities  never  become  in- 
dependent existences;  they  remain  cold,  colourless  con- 
ceptions, numina  as  the  Romans  called  them,  that  is, 
supernatural  beings  whose  existence  only  betrays  itself 

2  Warde  Fowler,  Religious  Experience  of  Roman  People,  pp.   102,   103. 


ROMAN  RELIGION  287 

in  the  exercise  of  certain  powers."  3  In  the  fourth  and 
third  centuries  B.C.  the  pontifices  drew  up  lists,  known  as 
indigitamenta,  in  which  they  set  out  the  names  of  what 
Augustine  calls  a  "crowd  of  petty  gods." 4  Modern 
scholars  attribute  a  good  deal  of  their  work  to  their  own 
invention,  prompted  by  a  love  of  formalism  which  they 
shared  with  their  people.6 

Such  an  achievement  went  far  to  neutralise  any  instinct 
the  Roman  people  might  have  had  for  progress  in  re- 
ligion. The  people  had,  like  other  primitive  races,  a  firm 
belief  in  divination;  and  how  tenacious  their  belief  in 
portents  was,  is  shown  in  the  lists  given  to  us  by  Livy 
of  menacing  absurdities  which  worried  the  popular  mind 
during  the  war  with  Hannibal.  All  that  was  worst  in 
their  view  of  life  seems  to  have  been  maintained  by  the 
influence  of  Etruscan  religion  close  beside  them.  Etrus- 
cans had  from  time  to  time  held  Rome,  and  through  cen- 
turies of  Roman  history  Etruscan  priests  and  soothsayers 
and  quacks  generally  had  a  hearing  and  a  position  in 
Rome  that  we  might  call  extraordinary,  if  the  same  at- 
tention had  not  later  on  in  a  period  of  more  culture  been 
largely  transferred  to  "Chaldaeans."  But  in  our  days 
we  have  seen  two  great  Anglo-Saxon  peoples  invited  to 
believe  that  their  real  religion  is  to  be  found  in  Tibet. 
Mankind  has  always  with  it  a  type  of  mind  for  which 
truth  is  bound  up  with  the  exotic  and  the  unexamined. 
Roman  religion  produced  no  cosmogonic  myths,  and  no 
poetry  worthy  of  mention  gathered  about  it.6  It  re- 
mained more  archaic  than  any  which  we  can  trace  with 
much  clearness  in  the  Greek  world. 

It  is  worth  while  to  pause  to  ask  why  Roman  religion 
followed  this  strange  course.  It  may  seem  like  evading 

SWarde  Fowler,  Religious  Experience  of  the  Roman  People,  p.  157. 
4  Augustine,  de  Civ.  Dei,  iv.  9:  turba  minutorunt  deorum. 
SWarde  Fowler,  Religious  Experience  of  the  Roman  People,   pp.   158,  286, 
287. 

6  Gwatkin,  Gilford  Lectures,  it.   129,   131. 


288  PROGRESS  IN  RELIGION 

the  question  to  speak  of  the  genius  of  a  people,  but  races 
differ,  in  reality  as  well  as  in  historical  commonplace. 
Roman  history  and  Greek  show  an  extraordinary  con- 
trast of  national  types.  We  might,  almost  without  para- 
dox, say  there  is  no  history  of  Greece;  that  there  never 
was  a  Greece  till  Rome  conquered  it,  as  there  was  no 
India  till  England  gave  the  unity  in  one  rule,  one  lan- 
guage, and  one  culture.  One  Greek  state  found  it  as 
hard  to  co-operate  even  in  the  smallest  and  most  obvious 
things  with  another,  as  one  party  in  either  of  them  did 
with  rivals  it  met  daily  in  the  little  market  square.  Greek 
history  swarms  with  individualities;  if  a  typical  name 
were  sought,  it  might  very  well  be  Alcibiades;  there  is 
more  than  one  phase  of  truth  in  Aristotle's  unkind  quip 
that  "History  is  what  Alcibiades  did."  7  But  what  would 
be  a  typical  name  in  Roman  history  ?  It  would  probably 
be  Aemilius  or  Cornelius,  or  even  Marcus;  John  Doe 
and  Richard  Roe,  or  their  Latin  equivalents,  represent 
Roman  history  far  better  than  any  individual.  Roman 
nobles  made  friends  with  Varro  after  he  had  lost  the 
battle  of  Cannae;  they  did  it  to  save  the  state.  Athens 
never  really  made  friends  with  Alcibiades.  Broadly — and 
remembering  there  is  always  error  in  a  sentence  that  be- 
gins with  Broadly — we  might  say  the  individual  is  every- 
thing in  Greek  history  and  next  to  nothing  in  Roman. 
Corporate  feeling  was  the  most  difficult  thing  to  create 
or  evoke  in  a  Greek  city  state;  in  Rome,  city,  land  or 
empire,  it  could  be  taken  for  granted.  This  difference 
underlies  the  greatness  and  the  weakness  both  of  Greek 
and  Roman.  For  all  that  requires  co-operation  Rome  is 
transcendent;  she  can  develop  law  and  win  loyalty;  she 
can  govern ;  but  she  cannot  do  what  the  Greeks  do.  Does 
religion  in  our  judgment  seem  to  fall  more  within  the 
sphere  of  Greek  or  of  Roman?  Corporate  religion  the 

7  A  rather  loose  and  colloquial  version  of  Aristotle,  Poetics  9,  4,  p.  1451  B. 


ROMAN  RELIGION  289 

Roman  knew  and  managed  and  maintained,  as  he  did  so 
many  admirable  things,  largely  by  his  faculty  of  not 
thinking  about  them.  Where  he  thought  at  all,  the  key- 
thought  was  the  community;  but  if  he  went  beyond  this, 
he  was  lost,  as  is  seen  in  the  rapid  collapse  of  social 
morality  and  government  and  everything  else  in  the  sec- 
ond century  B.C.  Whatever  group-thinking  and  corporate 
religion  may  be,  if  they  are  anything  at  all,  they  do  not 
take  a  race  or  an  individual  very  far  when  the  mind  and 
the  soul  become  self-conscious. 

Moribus  antiquis  stat  res  Romano,  virisque?  said  En- 
nius  in  a  memorable  line,  and  Cicero,  looking  back,  quotes 
the  line  with  regret ;  he  too  feels  that  the  old  type  of  char- 
acter and  the  old  type  of  man  were  indeed  the  foundation 
of  Rome ;  but  the  old  character  is  forgotten  and  obsolete, 
lost  through  "penury  of  men."  In  his  book  On  Laws 
Cicero  writes  that  "To  maintain  the  rituals  of  the  family 
and  of  the  fathers  is  (since  antiquity  draws  closest  to  the 
gods)  to  uphold  religion  as  it  were  a  gift  of  the  gods."  9 
If  he  was  speaking  less  from  the  heart  here,  none  the 
less  ancient  religion  and  ancient  character  seemed  in 
retrospect  to  belong  together.  When  Ovid  congratulated 
himself  on  the  age  of  his  -floruit,  because  "it  suits  his 
character  so  well,"  what  was  to  be  said  ?  Is  the  Ovidian 
character  the  outcome  of  a  development  of  intelligence 
past  a  stage  at  which  the  old  religion  was  credible  or 
possible?  What  had  made  it  possible?  Is  the  inevitable 
production  of  Ovid,  and  his  like,  sufficient  proof  that  a 
line  of  development  has  been  wrong?  What  was  it  that 
changed  the  type  so  disastrously? 

Rome  had  welded  Italy,  broken  down  Carthage,  and 
made  the  acquaintance  of  Greece.  Masons  and  artists 

8  Ennius,  Annulet,  xv.   5   B;    (Muller,  Enniits,  p.   50);   rescued  from   a  lost 
book  of  Cicero  (de  Rep.  v.)   by  Augustine,  de  civ.  Dei,  ii.  *x. 

9  Cicero,  De  Legibvs,  ii.  n,  27:  lam  ritus  fomiliae  patrttrnqnt  servare  id  est, 
quoniam  antiqnitas  proxniue   accedit   ad  deos,   a   dis  quasi  trtditam  religionem 
tueri. 


290  PROGRESS  IN  RELIGION 

from  the  Greek  towns  in  Italy  had  long  frequented  the 
city.  But  in  the  second  Punic  war  more  forces  than  the 
Muse  with  winged  foot  invaded  the  fierce  and  warlike 
breed  of  Romulus.10  Greek  rites  were  introduced  early 
during  the  struggle  with  Hannibal,  and  before  it  was 
over  Cybele  was  brought  from  Pergamum — new  religion 
in  both  cases  fused  with  old  Roman  religion  under  stress 
of  fear,  and  a  turning-point  marked  in  the  religious  his- 
tory of  Rome,  after  which  "the  old  Roman  State  religion 
may  be  said  to  exist  only  in  the  form  of  dead  bones  which 
even  Augustus  will  hardly  be  able  to  make  live."  J1  The 
war  was  hardly  over  when  Philip  V  of  Macedon  required 
attention,  and  Rome  was  started  upon  her  career  of  ne- 
gotiation and  conquest  in  the  Balkan  peninsula;  and 
"captured  Greece  took  her  fierce  conqueror  captive  and 
brought  the  arts  into  rustic  Latium."  So  Horace  wrote 
long  after.12 

In  less  figurative  and  more  autobiographic  vein  Poly- 
bius  tells  how  his  intimacy  with  Scipio  Aemilianus  be- 
gan.13 He  was  one  of  the  Achaeans  detained  in  Italy, 
and  it  was  contrived  that  he  should  remain  in  Rome. 
One  day  Scipio  asked  why  Polybius  directed  all  his  con- 
versation to  the  elder  brother  (Fabius)  and  passed  him 
over;  could  it  be  that  Polybius  counted  him  far  below 
the  true  Roman  character  and  ways,  because  he  did  not 
care  to  plead  in  the  law  courts?  That  had  not  been  in 
Polybius'  mind,  and  from  that  day  they  were  as  kins- 
men. But  in  Polybius'  description  of  the  times,  of  the 
outburst  of  dissolute  living  and  the  reasons  he  gives  for 
it,  we  see  what  is  coming.  "In  the  first  place,  it  came 
from  the  prevalent  idea  that,  owing  to  the  destruction  of 

10  Cf.  the  two  lines  of  Porcius  Licinus,  quoted  by  Gellius,  Noct.  Att.,  xvii. 
21,  which   supply  the  exact  date  and  the  adjectives. 

11  Wissowa;  cf.  Warde  Fowler,  Religious  Experience  of  the  Roman  People, 
P-  3i9. 

12  Horace,  Epist.   II.,  i.   156. 

13  Polybius,  xxxii.  9,  10. 


ROMAN  RELIGION  291 

the  Macedonian  monarchy,  universal  dominion  was  se- 
cured to  them  beyond  dispute;  and  in  the  second  place, 
from  the  immense  difference  made,  both  in  public  and 
private  wealth  and  splendour,  by  the  importation  of  the 
riches  of  Macedonia  into  Rome."  14  Mr.  Warde  Fowler 
borrows  the  phrase  of  another  to  say  the  same;  Rome 
gained  the  whole  world  and  lost  her  own  soul.15  Side  by 
side  with  this  Polybius  noted  "a  large  number  of  learned 
men  from  Greece,  rinding  their  way  into  Rome."  16  For- 
eign religion,  empire,  the  wealth  of  a  great  Macedonian 
kingdom,  and  Greek  ideas — everything  came  at  once,  to 
a  people  unprepared. 

The  old  religion  had  not  been  thought  out;  the  old 
gods  had  represented  nothing  beyond  the  vague  fears  of 
primitive  man  and  his  conceptions  of  the  powers  that 
stirred  in  the  life  of  the  fields.  Rome  had  stood  on  the 
old  character;  that  too  had  rested  on  unexamined  in- 
stinct, or  on  a  sense  of  the  community  that  was  now 
giving  way.  In  the  hour  of  triumph  the  fear,  the  hope, 
the  self-restraint,  the  ambition  that  had  kept  her  to- 
gether had  no  longer  any  clear  object;  all  was  achieved. 
Character  and  self -discipline  may  be  proof  against  dan- 
ger, even  against  defeat,  and  yet  go  to  pieces  in  victory. 
Conduct  had  never  been  closely  related  to  religion  in 
Rome,  or  perhaps  in  any  people  in  its  earlier  stages.  By 
the  second  century  B.C.  the  old  religion  was  to  the  mod- 
ern thinker  fabulous;  it  was  at  most  an  affair  of  magic 
to  secure  crops  or  to  frustrate  portents;  but  objective 
truth,  reality,  mpral  teaching,  moral  sanctions  it  had 
none.  Latin  literature  really  began  with  Ennius,  and 
Ennius  had  translated  Euhemerus;  and  his  tragedies, 
modelled  on  those  of  Euripides,  emphasised  his  view  of 
the  irrelevance  of  gods  to  human  questions.  Nor  had 

14  Polybius,  xxxii.  n. 

16  Warde   Fowler,  Religious  Experience  of  the  Roinan  People,   p.   331. 

16  Polybius,  xxxii.   10. 


292  PROGRESS  IN  RELIGION 

conduct  a  base  in  philosophy,  for  Rome  had  no  philos- 
ophy. There  was  nothing  "to  fasten  down  the  images 
of  Daedalus."  17  For  centuries  boys  had  learnt,  and  for 
another  century  they  continued  to  learn,  the  Twelve 
Tables  by  heart — a  discipline  that  explains  much  of  the 
greatness  and  some  of  the  defects  of  Roman  nature.18 
It  made  Rome  a  nation  of  lawyers,  a  people  who  never 
thought  with  ease  except  in  legal  terms;  it  shaped  the 
most  enduring  part  of  the  heritage  of  Rome;  but  Law 
by  itself  is  an  insufficient  education.  No  Homer,  no 
Hesiod  even,  had  "made  a  theogony"  for  Rome;  what 
poetry  there  had  been,  seemed  rude  and  primitive,  as  no 
doubt  it  was;  and,  when  Greek  literature  was  revealed, 
Latin  song  was  allowed  to  die.  Without  Homer,  with- 
out Plato,  without  Israel's  discipline  of  prophecy  and 
captivity — her  gods  seemed  to  have  left  Rome  without 
any  glimmer  of  light,  to  have  allowed  her  to  reach  a 
national  maturity  and  a  power,  greater  and  more  endur- 
ing than  any  Assyrian  or  Persian  king  ever  knew,  but 
without  a  vestige  of  that  training  in  thought  and  feeling 
that  makes  men  human.  The  absence  of  thought-out 
views  of  morality,  of  God  and  the  soul,  left  Rome  a  prey 
to  any  scattered  and  unrelated  notions  that  she  might 
pick  up  by  accident  from  the  conquered  peoples.  The 
wonder  is,  not  that  corruption  swiftly  invaded  Roman 
character,  but  that  the  marvellous  structure  of  Roman 
empire  held  together  so  long. 

It  was  the  Roman  view,  says  Professor  Gwatkin,19 
that  truth  belonged  to  philosophy,  and  had  nothing  to  do 
with  religion.  People  in  the  second  century  B.C.  began 
to  be  clearer  about  this  distinction  and  to  draw  inferences 
from  it.  The  judgment  of  Polybius,  as  he  looks  at  a 
stage  that  is  passing  and  another  beginning,  is  significant : 

IT  Plato,  Meno,  98  A;  see  p.  185. 

18  Cicero,   de  Legibus,   ii.  23,  59. 

19  Knowledge  of  God  (Gifford  Lectures),  ii.  138. 


ROMAN  RELIGION  293 

"The  most  important  difference  for  the  better  which  the 
Roman  commonwealth  appears  to  me  to  display  is  in 
their  belief  about  the  gods.  For  what  in  other  nations  is 
looked  upon  as  a  reproach,  I  mean  a  scrupulous  fear  of 
the  gods,  seems  to  me  to  be  the  very  thing  which  keeps 
the  Roman  commonwealth  together.  To  such  an  ex- 
traordinary degree  of  tragic  effect  is  this  carried  among 
them,  so  ingrained  is  it,  both  in  private  life  and  public 
business,  that  nothing  could  exceed  it.  Many  people 
might  think  this  unaccountable;  but  in  my  opinion  their 
object  is  to  use  it  as  a  check  upon  the  common  people. 
If  it  were  possible  to  form  a  state  wholly  of  philosophers, 
such  a  custom  would  perhaps  be  unnecessary.  But  see- 
ing that  every  multitude  is  fickle,  and  full  of  lawless  de- 
sires, unreasoning  anger  and  violent  passion,  the  only 
resource  is  to  keep  them  in  check  by  mysterious  terrors 
and  tragedy  of  this  sort.  So,  I  think,  the  ancients  were 
not  acting  without  purpose  or  at  random,  when  they 
brought  in  among  the  vulgar  those  opinions  about  the 
gods  and  the  belief  in  the  punishments  in  Hades;  much 
rather  do  I  think  that  men  nowadays  are  acting  rashly 
and  foolishly  in  rejecting  them."  20  He  goes  on  to  speak 
of  the  superior  probity  of  Roman  officials  to  Greek, 
though  elsewhere  he  speaks  of  a  falling  off  in  honesty.21 
Polybius,  as  we  have  seen,  was  anticipated  in  this 
opinion  as  to  the  origin  and  purpose  of  religion  by 
Critias.22  It  is  not  so  certain,  as  these  writers  suppose, 
that  this  association  of  gods  with  morality  is  really  prim- 
itive at  all,  or  at  least  that  such  vague  ideas  of  such  an 
association  as  early  men  may  have  had  were  very  effec- 
tual in  fact  in  promoting  morality.  It  would  seem  to 
belong  to  a  developed  stage  of  religion  when  men  have  re- 

20  Polybius,    vi.    56.      See   Juvenal    2,    149-152    on   the   rejection   of   belief   in 
Hades. 

21  Polybius,  xviii.   35;   xxxii.    n. 

22  See  p.  174. 


294  PROGRESS  IN  RELIGION 

fleeted  more  comprehensively  upon  life,  and  a  great  deal 
depends  on  what  they  have  balanced  against  the  pains  of 
hell.  Plato,  we  saw,  rejected  as  immoral  the  common 
belief  that  punishment  for  sin  could  be  averted  by  the 
trivial  sacrifices  and  initiations  that  the  religious  of  his 
day  recommended  as  efficacious.  Nor  is  it  quite  clear  that 
fear  of  penalty  has  actually  been  an  effective  deterrent 
from  sin;  the  fear  perhaps  more  frequently  has  followed 
the  act,  and  has  been  a  motive  to  something  else.  In 
any  case  Polybius  and  Critias  both  think  hell  and  gods 
a  useful  contrivance  to  influence  the  vulgar.  Critias  was 
not  vulgar,  far  from  it,  he  was  a  gentleman,  and  the 
"pleasant  lie"  of  the  witty  inventor  did  not  disturb  him; 
it  was  useful  to  him  in  helping  to  keep  the  demos  in  its 
proper  place.  Nor,  one  would  imagine,  were  the  honest 
Romans,  who  in  magistracies  and  on  embassies  handled 
immense  sums  of  money  and  unlike  the  Greeks  stole  none 
of  it,  exactly  to  be  classed  with  the  vulgar.  Still  the 
passage  of  Polybius  is  of  value,  for  it  shows  us  that  the 
influence  of  the  old  religion  at  Rome  was  declining,  that 
simultaneously  common  honesty  was  on  the  wane,  and 
that  shrewd  and  patriotic  observers  were  beginning  to 
foresee  the  horrible  developments  of  the  century  that 
followed. 

Atrophy  of  the  spiritual  nature  proved  indeed  a  poor 
preparation  for  the  immense  and  sudden  enrichment  of 
life  in  material  and  intellectual  resources.  Apart  from 
tradition  and  the  example  of  parents  and  society,  both 
very  strong  factors  in  Rome,  there  was  nothing  to  stimu- 
late to  moral  endeavour,  there  was  nothing  to  prompt  to 
progressive  education  of  conscience.  Slavery  avenged 
itself  on  the  slave-owning  community  by  sapping  mar- 
riage; the  plundered  wealth  induced  the  temper  of  con- 
querors and  wastrels;  pleasure  became  the  guide  and 
motive  in  life.  The  individual  became  conscious  of  him- 


ROMAN  RELIGION  295 

self,  but  in  Rome  religion  neither  prompted  this  new  self- 
consciousness,  nor  solaced  it,  nor  restrained  it.  To  re- 
late this  new  individuality  to  the  universe,  to  find  within 
the  universe  response  either  in  personality  or  in  law, 
the  Roman  had  of  his  own  neither  religion  nor  philosophy 
that  availed. 

If  we  have  been  right  in  our  tentative  conclusion  that 
there  is  in  the  human  mind  an  instinct  that  drives  for 
the  personality  of  God  and  of  man  and  for  righteousness 
as  the  necessary  basis  and  condition  of  their  relations, 
we  should  expect  such  a  position  as  that  in  which  the 
Roman  found  himself  to  be  intolerable.  The  vacuum 
must  be  filled,  if  not  by  the  thought  of  Roman  pioneers, 
then  by  the  achieved  results  of  thinkers  of  other  stock. 
Epicureanism  and  scepticism  were  never  without  their 
representatives  in  Roman  society;  the  former  was  indeed 
the  earliest  philosophy  to  make  its  appearance  at  Rome, 
and  in  Lucretius  it  found  an  expositor  of  a  genius  such 
as  it  has  never  known  elsewhere. 

Yet  even  Lucretius  had  in  him,  as  M.  Martha  pointed 
out,  an  anti-Lucretius,  and  in  a  famous  passage  he  con- 
fesses to  an  instinct  of  the  heart  quite  contrary  to  the 
reason  he  works  out  in  his  head.  "When  we  look  up 
to  the  great  expanses  of  heaven,  the  aether  set  on  high 
above  the  glittering  stars,  and  the  thought  comes  into  our 
mind  of  the  sun  and  the  moon  and  their  goings;  then 
indeed  in  hearts  laden  with  other  woes,  that  doubt  too 
begins  to  wake  and  raise  its  head — Can  it  be  perchance, 
after  all,  that  we  have  to  do  with  some  vast  divine  power 
that  wheels  those  bright  stars  each  in  its  course?"  23  Our 
task  is  to  look  for  the  factors  of  progress,  and  surely  this 
sudden  and  unwelcome  rebound  of  mind,  which  the  Epi- 
curean poet  feels,  this  instinct  for  a  power  intelligible 
to  the  human  mind,  for  a  divine  mind  that  can  organise 

23  Lucretius,  v.   1204-1210. 


296  PROGRESS  IN  RELIGION 

a  world  of  real  beauty,  is  evidence  for  us  of  the  living 
power  of  the  ideas  which  we  have  traced  so  far  and  which 
we  might  not  have  looked  to  find  alive  in  such  a  region. 

Nor  is  the  transformation  of  the  Roman  gods  without 
significance  for  us.  Roman  religion  had  been  amazingly 
colourless;  but,  when  contact  was  really  established  with 
Greece,  following  a  practice  they  always  pursued,  the 
Romans  began  to  identify  their  dim  gods  with  the  bright 
figures  of  Greek  legend.  Venus  absorbed,  for  purposes 
of  art  and  literature,  all  the  charms  and  graces  of  Aphro- 
dite; Proserpina  became  poetic  in  the  garb  of  Persephone; 
Mercury  had  a  Homeric  hymn  to  give  him  personality 
and  character.  How  far  such  identifications  really  af- 
fected the  religion  (in  the  strictest  sense)  of  the  common 
people,  it  is  impossible  to  guess.  For  the  Roman  with- 
out Greek  culture  did  Venus  gain  divinity,  awe  or  power 
from  the  identification?  For  the  artist,  she  gained  in- 
finitely in  colour  and  movement,  but  when  it  came  to 
religion,  did  he  worship  her  more,  or  less,  or  not  at  all  ? 
Did  the  wall-painters  of  Pompeii,  did  Horace,  promote 
religion?  Had  Praxiteles  really  helped  Greek  religion? 
The  case  of  Jove  raises  these  questions  still  more  urgently, 
as  we  shall  see.  But  at  least,  the  Roman  deities,  by  be- 
ing "Olympianised"  gained  something  of  personality, 
real  or  conventional. 

Cybele  was  fetched  to  Rome  by  the  government  during 
the  Hannibalic  war,  to  quiet  the  nerves  of  the  people — 
a  function  which  our  own  rulers  during  our  war  con- 
sidered proper  to  the  churches.  For  four  centuries  she 
maintained  herself  there,  and  grew  to  be  perhaps  the 
chief  power  of  the  Pantheon,  till  Isis  at  last  gained  a 
place  of  equal  or  greater  importance.  When  Lucretius 
wishes  to  describe  the  lavish  grandeur  and  wealth  of  the 
pageant  of  Spring,  he  draws  a  parallel  picture  of  the  pro- 
cession of  Cybele.  Augustine  speaks  of  her  priests  with 


ROMAN  RELIGION  297 

whitened  faces  and  mincing  gait  still  anticking  about  the 
streets  in  his  day.  What  they  were,  Lucian  and  Apuleius 
tell  us.  It  is  impossible  not  to  feel  religion  degraded  by 
such  a  goddess  and  such  priests,  yet  Cybele  herself  con- 
tributes evidence  to  our  inquiry.  What  gave  her  such 
pre-eminence  ?  How  did  ritual  so  foolish,  so  unbalanced, 
so  magical,  so  evil,  appeal  to  men  and  women  ?  The  an- 
swer is  that  the  native  gods  of  Rome  and  Italy  had  no 
personality,  were  nothing,  and  were  incapable  of  becom- 
ing anything.  Greek  art  and  literature  for  people  of 
culture  might  give  them  a  literary  and  artistic  interest, 
but  scarcely  a  religious  value.  Cybele  was  much  more 
personal;  she  was,  or  she  wielded,  universal  power,  and 
she  recognised  personality  in  her  worshippers.  Whatever 
her  relations  with  the  State,  and  I  am  not  sure  what  these 
were,  her  main  concern  was  with  the  individual;  she 
offered  man  or  woman  an  endless  field  of  activity,  ex- 
citement and  sentiment,  and  it  was  the  attraction,  and 
the  fatal  weakness,  of  her  religion,  that  its  moral  claims 
were  not  exigent.  So  far,  positively  and  negatively,  she 
too  confirms  our  deductions  as  to  the  progressive  factors 
in  religion. 

If  the  government  invited  Cybele  to  Rome,  other  gods 
did  not  wait  for  an  invitation.  Bacchus  came  unasked,  and 
the  staider  elements  of  Roman  society  were  inexpres- 
sibly shocked  by  what  he  brought  with  him.24  Religious 
ecstasy  did  not  commend  itself  to  them;  there  had  been 
Greeks,  to  whom  it  was  shocking,  much  more  did  it 
shock  Romans,  especially  when  it  so  soon  became  asso- 
ciated with  gross  immorality,  in  fact  or  in  report.  Rome 
for  the  time  believed  the  worst;  and  whether  Livy's  story 
of  the  discovery  is  only  "an  interesting  romance"  or 
more  than  that,  the  worst  is  easily  credible  of  religions 

24  Livy,  xxxix.  16-18;  Warde  Fowler,  Religious  Experience,  pp.  344  f. ;  W.  E. 
Heitland,  Roman  Republic,   II.  s.  655. 


298  PROGRESS  IN  RELIGION 

where  excitement  is  of  the  essence  of  the  cult,  where 
thought  and  examination  rank  as  something  like  hostility 
or  apostasy,  where  feeling  is  the  supreme  criterion,  and 
where  secrecy  strengthens  the  spell  of  organisation.  Of 
other  cults  from  the  East,  it  is  not  needful  at  this  point 
to  speak  further.  As  with  Cybele's  religion,  so  with 
these;  the  empty  house  invited  them;  they  satisfied  for 
the  unreflective  the  instinct  that  seeks  personality  in  God 
and  the  recognition  of  the  individual.  With  right  and 
truth  they  had  little  concern,  and  their  adherents  paid 
the  inevitable  penalty  that  attends  forgetfulness  of  these 
things. 

Minds  more  serious  and  less  amenable  to  the  sway  of 
emotion  turned  to  Greek  philosophy  rather  than  to  Asi- 
atic cults.  God  or  truth  was  to  be  reached  rather  by  the 
most  divine  thing  in  man,  that  part  of  him  which  is 
noblest  and  leads  to  least  shame  and  fewest  regrets,  his 
reason.  Sentiment  betrayed  men  into  folly  and  super- 
stition, and  all  the  fear  and  horrors  and  shame  that  su- 
perstition involved.25  Of  Greek  philosophers,  the  Stoics 
were  most  akin  to  the  Roman  of  the  best  type.  Romans 
who  thought  or  speculated  at  all,  did  so  in  terms  of  law, 
and  they  had  reached  a  conception  very  near  to  Universal 
Law  in  their  Jus  Gentium.  The  Stoic  Law  of  Nature 
at  once  appealed  to  them ;  it  was  the  Law  which  they  had 
been  feeling  after  in  the  usages  common  to  all  the  tribes 
and  communities  they  knew,  the  same  but  higher  and 
grander  and  of  more  universal  scope,  free  from  the  ac- 
cidents of  race  and  place — a  law  of  Righteousness.  Like 
and  different  at  once,  it  appealed  to  the  greater  Roman 
lawyers  and  led  them  on  to  a  broadening  and  humanising 
of  thought,  the  reaction  of  which  upon  Roman  law  is 
one  of  the  great  contributions  of  Greek  philosophy  to 

25  The  writings  of  Cicero  (de  Divinatione,  ii.)  and  of  Plutarch  (de  Sufer* 
stitione)  may  be  recalled  here. 


ROMAN  RELIGION  299 

human  progress.26  Greek  thought  saved  the  better  Ro- 
mans from  the  effects  of  Oriental  superstition  and  gave 
a  new  basis  for  the  old  Roman  character — how  sound  and 
true  a  basis  we  can  read  in  the  series  of  great  Romans 
of  history.  For,  however  much  legend  glorified  the  past, 
the  really  great  and  interesting  men  of  Rome  come  rather 
after  than  before  the  wars  with  Pyrrhus  and  Hannibal. 
Yet,  even  so,  Stoicism  among  the  Romans  is  amenable 
to  the  same  criticism  as  among  Greeks.  Its  relentless 
honesty  and  its  imperfect  psychology  together  led  to 
omissions  and  negations  fatal  for  religious  development. 
But  as  in  Greek  history  our  minds  turn  perhaps  too 
exclusively  to  the  fifth  century  B.C.,  in  Roman  history 
the  first  century  B.C.  occupies  us  above  all  others,  and 
the  pre-occupation  is  less  open  to  criticism.  Cicero  and 
Virgil  and  their  contemporaries  lived  in  a  time  of  decline 
and  of  rebirth ;  they  were  bridge-builders  from  the  old  to 
the  new  across  a  gulf  of  chaos.  However  interesting  to 
the  anthropologist  the  earliest  ages  of  Roman  religion,  if 
recoverable,  may  be,  for  our  purposes  the  peoples  of 
higher  culture  are  more  important,  and  our  concern  is 
with  the  factors  that  make  for  progress.  Till  Rome  fell, 
and  when  Rome  had  fallen,  the  last  years  of  the  Republic 
and  the  earliest  of  the  Empire  gave  its  great  direction  to 
Roman  thought.  Caesar  made  the  framework  on  which 
society  modelled  itself  down  to  n  November  1918;  Cic- 
ero far  more  than  Plato — odd  as  it  may  seem — shaped 
the  thoughts  of  Western  Europe  down  to  the  Renais^ 
sance ;  Virgil  and  Horace — a  strange  pair  of  names,  how- 
ever familiar,  with  Virgil  always  in  the  ascendent — 
quickened  imagination,  and,  as  originality  declined, 
stereotyped  the  modes  of  poetry.  Whatever  Greece  and 
the  Orient  contributed  to  Rome,  for  thinking  people  those 

28  Lecky,   Morals,    i.    294-7,    refers  to  the  effect   on   the   Reformation   of   the 
renewed  study  of  Roman  Law.     See  also  Gwatkin,  Gifford  Lectures,  ii.    137. 


300  PROGRESS  IN  RELIGION 

influences  were  mediated  by  these  great  men.  Disre- 
garding a  strict  chronology,  we  will  turn  at  once  to  them 
and  take  them  in  the  wrong  order. 

Whether  we  deal  with  the  politics,  the  loves  or  the 
religious  ideas  of  Horace,  the  great  thing  is  not  to  take 
them  too  seriously.  He  was,  he  said,  an  adherent  of  no 
school,  not  even  an  eclectic — 

Nullius  addictus  jurare  in  verb  a  magistri — IT 

a  Matine  bee  that  covered  a  good  deal  of  ground  and 
gathered  honey  from  opening  flowers  of  many  kinds.28 
Nor  must  it  be  forgotten,  while  he  preaches — always  on 
the  same  theme  and  with  perhaps  more  iteration  than  was 
needed — that  he  was  a  man  of  humour,  who  would  say 
less  than  he  meant  or  more,  and  both  without  explaining 
to  the  reader  (like  a  certain  modern  tutor)  that  "of 
course  he  was  only  jocose."  Horace  then  has  moods 
of  the  most  charming  piety.  Faunus  frequents  the  poet's 
country  farm  and  protects  his  goats,  while  the  rocks  ring 
to  the  poet's  rustic  pipe;  "the  gods  protect  me;  to  the 
gods  my  piety  is  dear,  my  Muse  is  dear."  29  When  the 
accursed  tree80  sent  its  branch  crashing  on  the  poet's 
head,  Faunus  was  there  and  turned  aside  the  blow.31 
He  sees  Bacchus  amid  distant  hills,  the  nymphs  around 
him;  though  posterity,  bidden  to  believe,  has  hesitated.32 
Jupiter  thunders  from  a  clear  sky,  and  the  poet,  a  care- 
less and  intermittent  pietist,  as  he  confesses,  retraces  his 
steps  and  abandons  an  insane  philosophy.33  If  old  ac- 
quaintance tempt  one  to  linger  over  these  poems,  it  is 
not  altogether  idly.  In  early  life  Horace  had  been  frankly 


27  Epp., 

28  Odes, 

29  Odes, 

30  Odes, 

31  Odes, 
82  Odes, 
33  Odes, 


I,  14. 

v.  2,  27,  plurimttm  circa  nemus. 

17,  ii. 
»•  17,  27. 
i.  17,  28. 
i.  19,  i. 

34,  i. 


ROMAN  RELIGION  301 

Epicurean,34  careless  of  these  matters,  and  a  literary 
conversion  rather  implies  growth  in  humour  than  in  grace. 
Yet  it  must  be  clear  that  Stoic  teaching  came  to  interest 
him.  Of  course  Stoic  paradox  and  eccentricity  are  as 
amenable  to  playful  handling  as  the  gods  and  nymphs 
of  the  Odes,  though  less  charming.  But  Horace  clearly 
gave  more  of  his  mind  to  Stoic  books.  Like  Robert 
Burns,  where  he  is  most  solemn  and  impressive,  he  is 
least  serious.  He  may  picture  Augustus  recumbent  and 
sipping  nectar  with  purple  lips  between  Pollux  and  Her- 
cules; 35  he  may  speculate  as  to  what  incarnation  Augus- 
tus really  is,36  and  pray  for  delay  in  his  return  to  heaven ; 
but  he  knew  Augustus,  and  he  did  not  push  himself  on 
the  Emperor's  acquaintance.  In  all,  Odes  and  Epistles 
give  us  the  religion  of  a  charming  man  of  letters  in  com- 
fortable circumstances,  a  bachelor  in  every  implication  of 
his  being,  possessed  of  culture  and  humour,  and  owner 
of  a  good  library.  He  has  never  been  vates  Gentilium; 
even  if,  a  priest  of  the  Muses,  he  chanted  lordly  lays, 
unheard  before,  to  virgins  and  to  boys,  the  idea  of  being 
a  prophet  to  lighten  the  Gentiles  would  have  amused 
him.87 

Cicero  had  far  more  influence.  A  lost  philosophical 
book  of  his  was  the  first  thing  to  stir  the  mind  of  Augus- 
tine. He  gave  Europe  its  philosophical  terminology;  he 
wrote  in  his  Dream  of  Scipio  the  best  religious  apologue 
of  Latin  literature ; 38  he  discussed  gods  and  divination 
and  the  purpose  of  life  in  books  that  his  countrymen 
treasured.  Yet  it  is  hard  to  find  in  him  a  religious  spirit. 
However  religious  and  spiritual  he  might  have  been  at 
heart,  it  would  not  have  been  to  Atticus  perhaps  that  he 
could  most  comfortably  have  revealed  this  side  of  his 

34  Cf.  Satires,  i.  5,  101. 

35  Odes,  iii.  3,   n. 

36  Odes,  i.  2,  41  f. 

37  Odes,  iii.   i.  2. 

38  See  p.  345. 


302  PROGRESS  IN  RELIGION 

nature.  To  his  wife's  religion  he  refers  in  a  notable 
letter  at  the  moment  of  his  exile;  "The  gods  whom  you 
have  always  sedulously  worshipped,  have  not  helped  us, 
nor  men  whom  I  have  always  cultivated."  Yet  when 
Tullia  his  daughter  died,  he  craved  to  think  her  im- 
mortal, to  deify  her  and  preserve  her  memory  in  a  shrine. 
But  shrine-memorials  suggest  troubled  affection  more 
than  clear  thinking.  What  did  he  think?  It  is  noted 
that  his  books  on  religion  belong  to  the  last  two  years 
of  his  life,  when  the  world  crumbled  under  his  feet  and 
his  Tullia  was  gone.  But  the  Cicero,  who  lived  in  the 
stream  of  the  world,  who  was  alert  and  alive  to  politics, 
to  literature,  to  all  the  gleam  and  interest  of  life,  drew 
his  philosophy  and  his  religious  ideas  from  books.  He 
had  not  lived  in  religious  thought,  and  he  is  critical  of 
it.  Such  a  mind  will  inevitably  weigh  and  criticise  idea 
or  proposition  that  comes  from  another,  and  at  last  all 
that  itself  produces.  "Perhaps"  is  its  last  word  in  re- 
ligion— "perhaps"  followed  by  a  silence  and  a  sigh.  We 
must  not  miss  the  self-criticism  of  that  last  word  and  of 
the  sigh ;  contemporaries  caught  them  and  knew  that  they 
must  turn  elsewhere  for  certainty.  Teacher  as  the  Cicero 
of  the  speeches  and  of  the  treatises  was,  charming  as  his 
correspondence  is  still,  he  too  was  no  prophet  of  the 
Gentiles. 

That  name  was  given  to  Virgil  by  a  later  and  a  Chris- 
tian generation.  Who  gave  it,  I  do  not  know,  perhaps 
it  is  not  known;  89  but  the  Christian  world  and  Dante 
accepted  it;  and  common  Christian  feeling,  reinforced 
by  genius  of  such  greatness,  is  no  bad  guide.  The  last 
fact  and  the  first  about  Horace  and  Cicero  for  students 


89  Tyrrell,  Latin  Poetry,  p.    156.     The  rubric  of   Rouen  includes  a  ceremony 
for  Christmas  Day,  when  the  priest  says: — 

Maro,    Maro,    Votes    Gentilium 

Da  Christo  testimonium, 
and   Virgil   replies. 


ROMAN  RELIGION  303 

of  religion  is  that  they  were  not  religious  spirits;  but 
Virgil  was,  pre-eminently.  His  transcendence  as  an  art- 
ist may  hide  his  religious  quality  from  some  readers,  but 
he  is  not  Sophocles.  In  his  youth  he  was  Epicurean.  The 
graceful  Season  verses,  that  announce  his  purpose  to 
study  with  Siro  and  free  his  life  from  all  care,  are  gen- 
uine enough  and  quite  clear  in  import.  By  and  by  he 
is  reconciling  Silenus  with  Epicurus;  he  sets  the  god 
singing  in  Lucretian  tones  a  cosmogony  that  drifts  to- 
ward Pythagoreanism.  Reconciliation  is  his  work;  per- 
haps if  we  take  it  as  a  true  outcome  of  interpretation,  it 
is  the  work  of  every  poet.  But  Virgil  attempts  it  not 
quite  as  the  Stoics  did.  The  world  let  Posidonius  go ;  at 
the  best  he  effected  a  compromise  that  worked  for  a  while 
and  then  was  more  and  more  patently  wrong.40  Virgil's 
compromise  was  hopeless  from  the  first.  Olympus  was 
not  and  could  not  conceivably  be  as  he  drew  it;  "Jupiter's 
chance,"  says  Mr.  Warde  Fowler  in  a  brilliant  sentence, 
"was  destroyed  by  the  Aeneid."  41  Virgil's  Jupiter  had 
traits  of  the  Zeus  whose  loves  are  portrayed  in  the  wall- 
paintings  of  Pompeii,  traits  too  of  the  Stoic  Zeus,  traits 
of  the  Homeric  and  of  Fate ;  and  at  the  end  of  the  Aeneid 
Jupiter  has  to  throw  the  thing  up,  he  cannot  settle  Aeneas' 
affairs,  nor  his  own,  he  does  not  know  who  he  is  or  where 
he  is — fata  viam  invenient.  The  Virgilian  compromise 
will  not  serve;  Virgil  had  not  been  an  Epicurean  for 
nothing.  But  reconciliation  there  must  be,  and  he  saw  it 
— or,  rather,  felt  it.  His  heart  clearly  leaned  to  the  old 
impossible  Italian  gods,  far  more  native  to  him  than  any 
Homeric  Zeus,  however  Stoical,  with  time  and  popular 
teaching,  Zeus  had  become.  Virgil  felt  the  need  of  the 
heart  for  God ;  his  solitary  unhappy  Aeneas,  like  Marcus 
Aurelius,  drags  along  the  path  of  duty,  brave  and  in- 

40  For  Posidonius,  see  p.  343. 

41  Warde  Fowler,  Roman  Ideas  of  Deity,  p.  141. 


304  PROGRESS  IN  RELIGION 

domitable,  but  his  goddess-mother  never  really  under- 
stands her  son.  Virgil  understood  him. 

Goethe  once  said  that  man's  business  is  not  to  solve 
the  problem  of  the  universe  but  to  understand  it.  This 
latter  task  Virgil  achieved,  and,  for  those  who  can  feel, 
the  great  question  is  set  out  in  his  poetry.  The  human 
heart  is  there,  conscious  of  its  own  needs,  and  those 
needs  are,  as  we  have  seen  already,  God  and  -righteous- 
ness and  the  assurance  of  one's  own  personality.  The 
philosophers  were  discarding  two  of  them,  the  pietists 
in  the  Oriental  cults  the  other.  Virgil  keeps  the  problem 
open.  Whatever  the  theme  or  the  object  of  his  Aeneid, 
the  poet's  heart  is  unveiled  in  it — the  supreme  thing  in 
poetry,  and  it  answered  to  the  heart  of  man.  When  the 
Roman  world  accepted  Christianity,  it  threw  over  Cybele 
and  Isis  and  Mithras,  as  it  had  thrown  over  the  Stoics 
long  before,  but  it  kept  Virgil. 

Rome  gave  up  its  old  religion,  and  borrowed  from 
Greek  and  Oriental,  and  all  its  borrowings  are  significant. 
But  as  Virgil  borrowed  from  Homer,  and  what  he  bor- 
rowed ceased  to  be  Homeric  and  became  Virgilian,  so 
the  Roman  gave  something  to  what  he  took.  To  the 
world's  stock  of  religious  ideas  he  added  those  of  order 
and  law  and  the  sense  of  the  practical.42  These  were 
not  new,  but  he  gave  them  another  significance  than  they 
had  for  Greek  and  Oriental.  His  religion  had  been  as- 
sociated with  morality,  by  instinct  rather  than  by  reflec- 
tion. His  emphasis  on  law  and  on  conduct  gave  men  new 
views  which  developed  into  the  concept  of  sin — an  idea 
closely  germane  to  that  tendency  to  Righteousness  which 
we  have  so  often  remarked,  a  legitimate  pendant  to  it, 
which  has  been  fruitful  in  human  thinking.  He  re- 
created the  Law  of  Nature  and  made  it  a  more  effectual 

42  To  discuss  this  at  all  adequately  would  take  us  too  far  into  the  history  of 
the  Christian  Church. 


ROMAN  RELIGION  305 

thing.  He  emphasised  the  community  in  religion — a  new 
interpretation  of  the  principle  of  righteousness.  Some 
of  his  contributions  to  the  world's  stock  of  religious  ideas 
have  been  less  happy.  Roman  Stoicism  influenced  Chris- 
tian views  of  God  and  of  society  too  much.  Law  and 
order  have  again  and  again  been  over-emphasised  by 
minds  of  the  Roman  cast,  and  the  individual  has  been 
lost  in  the  over-orderly  community.43  Thus  by  what  he 
had  not  and  by  what  he  had,  the  Roman  contributed  to 
progress  in  religion,  as  a  strong  and  virile  race  always 
will. 

43  I  believe  this  to  be  the  most   potent  reason   for  the  fall  of  the   Roman 
Empire. 


XIV 
JUDAISM  AFTER  ANTIOCHUS 

ANTIOCHUS  EPIPHANES,  as  Tacitus 1  put  it,  was  pre- 
vented by  a  Parthian  war  from  civilising  a  very  horrible 
race.  He  failed  to  Hellenise  the  Jews  in  his  sense  of 
the  word;  Judaism  survived,  and  with  a  new  conscious- 
ness that  Hellenism  and  Judaism  were  two  things.  The 
"peaceful  penetration"  of  Israel's  religion  by  Greek  in- 
fluences was  abruptly  ended;  the  two  things  were  alien 
and  represented  different  histories,  different  outlooks, 
principles  that  definitely  clashed  and  that  could  not  be 
mistaken,  that  could  not  slide  into  one  another.  The 
third  stage  of  international  relations  was  reached.  The 
interaction  which  began  unconsciously  or  semi-con- 
sciously  was  brought  to  a  new  stage  by  the  Seleucid  king's 
violence;  the  violence  that  failed.  Henceforward  such 
relations  as  there  are  between  the  peoples  and  the  ideals 
are  conscious.  Contact  or  conflict,  whichever  it  be,  men 
have  their  eyes  open  and  know  what  they  are  doing. 

For  contact  and  for  conflict  there  were  more  and  more 
opportunities.  The  Jew  had  not  to  leave  the  promised 
land  to  find  Greek  cities  with  all  their  challenge — the 
naked  athletes,  the  theatre,  the  idol's  temple,  the  deified 
king,  the  philosopher,  the  Greek  hat,  all  the  accursed 
things  that  had  been  the  prelude  to  the  attack  of  Epiph- 
anes.  "Jason"  says  the  writer  of  Second  Maccabees 
(iv.  n),  "introduced  new  customs  forbidden  by  the  law; 
he  deliberately  established  a  gymnasium  under  the  citadel 
itself  and  made  the  noblest  of  the  young  men  wear  the 

1  Tacitus,  Hift.  v.  8. 

306 


JUDAISM  AFTER  ANTIOCHUS  307 

petasos.  And  to  such  a  height  did  the  passion  for  Greek 
fashions  rise  .  .  .  that  the  priests  were  no  longer  in- 
terested in  the  services  of  the  altar,  but  despising  the 
sanctuary  and  neglecting  the  sacrifices,  they  hurried  to 
take  part  in  the  unlawful  displays  held  in  the  palaestra 
after  the  quoit-throwing  had  been  announced."  Jeru- 
salem was  indeed  purified ;  but  the  tone  of  the  writer,  and 
the  things  that  he  selects  as  specially  horrible,  show  how 
a  patriotic  Jew  might  feel  towards  customs  and  practices 
that  would  not  strike  everybody  as  particularly  depraved. 
The  Hindu  to-day  has  a  somewhat  similar  feeling  for 
many  things  that  Europeans  do  without  any  conscious- 
ness that  they  are  unclean  or  offensive;  and  to  this  day 
the  hat  is  a  symbol — there  are  some  sixty  varieties  in 
Bombay,  all  with  significance,  the  Parsi  horse-shoe  hat 
being  that  which  is  most  easily  recognised  by  a  newcomer. 
But  the  Jew  did  not  confine  himself  to  the  land  God 
gave  to  his  fathers;  he  was  settled  as  a  permanency  in 
Babylon,  as  we  have  seen,  and  in  Egypt.  A  quarter  of 
a  century  after  Antiochus,  a  Roman  magistrate,  achieved 
glory  and  a  name  by  ordering  in  139  B.C.  the  expulsion 
from  Rome  of  all  Jews  and  other  Orientals  with  them.2 
Of  course  they  returned,  and,  as  the  New  Testament 
and  Tacitus 3  tell  us,  they  were  expelled  again,  to  return 
again.  The  Jew  was  making  the  world  his  own,  but 
travelling  as  a  self-conscious  foreigner.  Herodotus, 
Greek  as  he  was,  essentially  Greek,  travelled  and  ob- 
served with  much  less  detachment.  But,  however  much 
one  may  make  detachment  a  practice  or  a  principle,  the 
milieu  always  tells.  One's  sympathies  with  persecuted 
co-religionists  may  be  immense,  but  one  does  not  neces- 
sarily wish  them  in  the  railway  carriage;  they  may  be 
more  alien  than  their  reprobate  persecutor.  The  milieu 

2  Valerius  Maximus,  i.   3.   3;  the  man  was  Hispalus. 

3  Tacitus,  Annals,  ii.   85,  vile  domnum. 


308  PROGRESS  IN  RELIGION 

tells;  the  chance  remark,  the  attitude,  the  written  page 
of  the  Greek,  his  quick,  bright  ways,  his  shrewd  tongue, 
penetrate  the  defences.  The  Jew  remains  a  loyal  He- 
brew, he  resents  the  criticism,  but  he  cannot  ignore  it; 
to  meet  it  he  must  do  a  lot  of  rethinking;  is  that  contact 
or  conflict,  or  both?  But  the  contact  was  far  more  de- 
liberate. 

With  all  that  Greeks  now  and  then  talked  about  the 
religions  and  the  philosophies  of  barbarians,  they  seem 
to  have  given  little  attention  to  their  languages  and  litera- 
tures. Berossos,  Manetho,  and  Megasthenes  are  names 
that  stand  out ;  4  but  when  one  recalls  that  Plutarch  5  only 
once  refers  to  a  poetic  literature,  so  near  and  so  ob- 
vious as  the  Latin,  and  that  only  to  confirm  some  his- 
torical fact  from  a  passage  of  Horace,  it  is  not  surprising 
that  Greek  knowledge  of  things  Egyptian  or  Assyrian 
was  very  slight,  of  things  Indian  next  to  negligible.  But 
the  Jew  is  not  amenable  to  this  reproach.  To  mingle  in 
the  world  at  all,  he  had  to  know  Greek,  and  the  evidences 
of  his  interest  in  Greek  literature  are  abundant.  Long 
before  Josephus  Jews  were  writing  their  history  in  Greek; 
they  composed  tragedies  on  Greek  models  about  the  Exo- 
dus from  Egypt 6  and  so  forth,  they  compiled  sibylline 
oracles  in  Greek  hexameters,  and,  more  significant  than 
all,  they  read  deeply  in  Greek  philosophy.  The  "Disper- 
sion," of  course,  had  most  points  of  contact;  Alexan- 
drian Judaism  would  necessarily  meet  Hellenism  and  be 
influenced  by  it  more  readily  than  Palestinian;  and  Gali- 
lee would  be  more  susceptible  to  foreign  ways  than  Jeru- 
salem. In  the  period  now  before  us  we  find  in  Jewish 
thinking  a  heightened  Nationalism,  clearly  resulting  from 
the  persecution  of  Epiphanes  and  perhaps  other  similar 

4  See  p.  78. 

5  Trench,  Plutarch,  p.  9;   Plutarch,  Lucullus,  39. 

6  Considerable  extracts   from   Ezekiel,  the  tragic  poet,  are  given  by   Eusebius, 
Praef.  Evang.,  ix.  28,  29,  pp.  436-447. 


JUDAISM  AFTER  ANTIOCHUS  309 

movements,  but  also  a  developed  Internationalism,  cos- 
mopolitan, but  Jewish  still.  A  short  notice  of  two  char- 
acteristic books  may  serve  as  well  as  generalisation. 

The  book  of  Tobit  may  be  "certainly  pre-Maccabean"  7 
or  it  may  have  been  written  about  150  B.C.  It  was  cer- 
tainly not  a  contemporary  story  of  the  man  whose  name 
it  bears,  even  if  he  be  historical.  It  shows  easy  habits 
of  travel,  a  wide  acquaintance  with  foreign  lands  and  a 
free  adoption  of  legends  and  folk-lore  from  sources  out- 
side Judaism.  The  writer  has  liberal  sympathies,  and 
lacks  that  hatred  of  the  heathen  which  animates  much 
of  later  Jewish  literature.  The  contact  with  the  strange 
story  of  Ahikar,  which,  we  recently  learned,  existed  in 
Aramaic  in  the  fifth  century  B.C.,  is  a  point  of  interest; 
and  scholars  note  the  absence  of  references  to  later  Jewish 
ideas,  such  as  the  personified  Wisdom  of  God,  the  Mes- 
siah, and  the  belief  in  resurrection  or  immortality.  Even 
the  dog  in  the  story  becomes  an  indication  of  an  attitude 
not  very  Jewish.  Whose  dog  was  it  ?  critics  have  asked, 
the  author's  or  a  interpolator's?  And  yet  this  book  of 
many  affinities  is  the  story  of  a  good  Jewish  family.  It 
has  always  been  popular;  it  was  translated  to  and  fro  in 
the  languages  of  antiquity;  it  has  given  subjects  to  art. 
"Is  it  history?"  wrote  Luther.  "Then  it  is  holy  history. 
Is  it  fiction?  Then  is  it  a  truly  beautiful,  wholesome, 
and  profitable  fiction,  the  performance  of  a  gifted  poet." 
In  any  case  it  gives  us  a  picture  of  Israel  among  the 
nations,  not  yet  antagonised. 

The  book  of  Wisdom  is  variously  dated  between  130 
and  100  B.C.,  after  50  B.C.  and  under  the  Roman  Empire. 
The  writer  reveals  himself  to  us  in  every  page  as  a  reader 
of  Jewish  and  Gentile  literature,  a  stylist,  a  thinker.  If 
he  is  over  rhetorical  at  times,  he  learnt  that  from  the 

7  D.    C.    Simpson    in   Apocr.   and  Pseudepigr.,    i.    183;    Sir   G.    Adam    Smith, 
Jerusalem,  ii.  p.  395. 


310  PROGRESS  IN  RELIGION 

Greek  schools  of  his  day,  but  the  judgment  is  a  sound 
one  that  calls  his  book  the  highwater  mark  of  Jewish 
thought  between  the  Old  and  New  Testaments.  The 
author's  mind,  of  course,  runs  upon  morals,  like  the 
author  or  authors  of  those  Jewish  writings  with  which 
his  book  is  allied.  But  he  thinks  of  God  in  a  central  way, 
and  he  has  conceptions  of  God  which  are  not  of  the  He- 
brew type.  That  God  is  the  creator  of  the  world  and 
of  all  things  in  it,  the  Hebrew  Psalmists  tell  us  in  lan- 
guage of  beauty  which  is  a  sign  of  their  delight  in  Na- 
ture.8 This  writer  has  the  same  thought,  but  he  gives  a 
different  turn  to  it.  Men,  he  says,  by  not  giving  heed 
to  the  works  miss  the  Artificer;  they  have  deified  fire, 
wind,  the  swift  air,  the  circling  stars;  but  "if,  through 
delight  in  their  beauty,  they  took  them  to  be  gods,  let 
them  know  how  much  better  than  these  is  their  Sovereign 
Lord;  for  the  first  author  of  beauty  created  them"  (xiii. 
1-4, 6  rov  xaXhovs  yevfffidpxrjS).  The  Hebrew  God 
created  the  world  out  of  nothing;  this  man's  Creator 
made  it  "of  formless  matter"  (xi.  17,  e£  dpop<pov  v\jj?). 
To  find  in  this  expression  evidence  for  his  belief  in  the 
eternity  of  matter,  is  perhaps  to  make  him  too  severe  a 
Platonist;  but  he  platonises  clearly.  This  reference  to 
matter  is  followed  by  a  variant  on  "God  always  geome- 
trising" — "By  measure  and  number  and  weight  thou  didst 
order  all  things"  (xi.  20).  He  reasserts  "eternal  Provi- 
dence" again  and  again  (xvii.  2)  : — "Thy  providence,  O 
Father,  steers  the  ship  on  the  sea"  (xiv.  3)  ;  God  "thinks 
ahead,  is  provident,  for  all"  (vi.  8)  ;  "The  spirit  of  the 
Lord  fills  the  world"  (i.  7);  God  can  be  known  and  un- 
derstood by  the  righteous  and  thoughtful.  But  the  most 
striking  expression  of  God's  nature  and  character  is 
this : — "Thou  lovest  all  things  that  are,  and  abhorrest 
none  of  the  things  which  thou  didst  make;  for  never 

8  Cf.  especially  Psalm  civ. 


JUDAISM  AFTER  ANTIOCHUS  311 

wouldst  thou  have  formed  anything  if  thou  didst  hate 
it.  And  how  would  anything  have  endured,  except  thou 
hadst  willed  it?  Or  that  which  was  not  called  by  thee, 
how  would  it  have  been  preserved?  But  thou  sparest 
all  things  because  they  are  thine,  O  Sovereign  Lord, 
thou  Lover  of  souls"  (xi.  23-26).  Is  it  Plato  or  a 
Hebrew  inspiration  here  ?  For  we  have  reached  a  thinker 
whose  conception  of  God  is  a  very  signal  one.  He  has 
a  strong  Hebrew  feeling  for  the  personality  of  God,  he 
does  not  decline  like  a  Greek  upon  abstracts,  though  he 
can  use  them ;  and  he  emphasises  the  most  personal  thing 
in  personality — love,  and  makes  it  the  motive  of  the  crea- 
tion and  preservation  of  that  universe  to  which  he  gives 
its  great  Greek  name  of  cosmos.  In  virtue  of  the  terms 
and  spirit  of  its  creation,  he  can  say  of  it:  "The  universe 
is  a  champion  of  the  righteous"  (xvi.  17).  The  Hebrew 
Psalmist  had  said  "the  angel  of  the  Lord" ;  but  this  in 
its  way  is  a  greater  saying.  The  Stoic  could  have  said 
this  of  the  universe — 'did,  in  fact,  say  it  in  one  phrase 
and  another — and  fell  into  pantheism,  said  it  because  he 
was  a  pantheist;  but  the  writer  of  Wisdom,  as  we  have 
seen,  escapes  pantheism  altogether. 

As  St.  Paul  did  later  on,  the  writer  of  Wisdom  traces 
to  idolatry  a  great  deal  of  the  evil  of  the  world — "the 
devising  of  idols  was  the  beginning  of  fornication,  and 
the  invention  of  them  the  corruption  of  life"  (xiv.  12). 
The  origin  of  idolatry  he  explains  in  a  Greek  way,  fol- 
lowing Euhemerus,  as  Christian  writers  did  after  him. 
The  image  of  the  dead  child  or  of  the  distant  king  be- 
came a  god  (xiv.  15-17)  and  Art  helped  the  delusion 
(xiv.  19).  The  consequences,  and  here  he  is  strictly 
historical,  were  "slaughtering  of  children  in  solemn  rites, 
celebrating  secret  mysteries,  holding  frantic  revels  of 
strange  ordinances,"  followed  by  every  sort  of  moral 
disorder;  and  "that  multitude  of  evils  they  call  peace" 


312  PROGRESS  IN  RELIGION 

(xiv.  22).  Idolatry  God  judges,  and  its  consequences, 
but  not  vindictively.  Even  to  the  Canaanites  He  gave 
opportunity  for  repentance  (xii.  10),  but  they  would 
not  take  it;  they  were  (perhaps  he  forgets  another  belief 
of  his  here,  in  a  moment  of  eloquence)  "a  seed  accursed 
from  the  beginning"  (xiv.  n)  ;  and  they  were  destroyed 
"that  the  land  which  in  thy  sight  is  most  precious  of  all 
lands  might  receive  a  worthy  colony  of  God's  servants" 
(xiv.  7).  Thus  Israel's  possession  of  the  land  with  the 
extermination  of  its  older  inhabitants  is  justified;  for  he 
is  a  Jew,  however  much  Greek  thought  influences  him. 
But  he  hints  at  Nemesis,  which  is  Greek,  while  he  exults 
as  a  Jew  over  the  Egyptians  in  their  plagues — "The 
doom  they  deserved  was  dragging  them  into  this  end" 
(xix.  4).  Similarly,  when  he  deals  with  conduct  and 
righteousness,  he  blends  the  Jewish  and  the  Greek;  he 
has  the  four  cardinal  virtues  which  the  Stoics  took  from 
Plato;  but  he  makes  the  centre  of  life,  as  a  good  Hebrew 
would,  to  seek  God,  to  trust  God,  to  be  faithful  to,  Him 
and  to  love  Him  (iii.  9) — and  then  must  needs  give  it 
a  Greek  turn  again,  for  it  is  "to  think  of  the  Lord  with 
a  good  mind"  (i.  i),  since  "crooked  thoughts  separate 
from  God"  (i.  3),  and  "the  holy  spirit  of  discioline  will 
flee  deceit"  (i.  5). 

It  is,  as  Dr.  Drummond  wrote,  hazardous  to  fix  on 
him  any  defined  eschatology;  it  more  and  more  becomes 
clear  that  no  eschatology  will  stand  definition.  Aut  videt 
aut  vidisse  putat  is  the  most  that  can  be  said  of  any 
eschatologist ;  and  of  another  school  of  Jews  Dr. 
Schechter  assures  us  that  "whatever  the  faults  of  the 
rabbis  were,  consistency  was  not  one  of  them."  Our 
writer,  however,  strikes  a  great  keynote  (however  he  is 
to  adjust  the  rest  of  his  music  to  it)  in  sayinr,  at  the 
start :  "God  made  not  death,  neither  delighteth  He  when 
the  living  perish:  for  He  created  all  things  that  they 


JUDAISM  AFTER  ANTIOCHUS  313 

might  have  being  .  .  .  nor  hath  Hades  royal  dominion 
on  earth"  (i.  13-14).  "God  created  man  for  incorrup- 
tion,  and  made  him  an  image  of  His  own  proper  being; 
but  by  envy  of  the  devil  death  entered  into  the  world, 
and  they  that  belong  to  his  realm  experience  it.  But 
the  souls  of  the  righteous  are  in  the  hand  of  God.  .  .  . 
Their  hope  is  full  of  immortality"  (ii.  23;  iii.  4).  He 
seems  to  imply  the  pre-existence  of  souls,  Greek  again 
here.  "I  was  a  child  good  by  nature  and  a  good  soul 
fell  to  my  lot ;  nay,  rather,  being  good  I  came  into  a  body 
undefiled"  (viii.  19,  20) ;  and  in  distant  reminiscence 
of  Plato  he  adds:  "A  corruptible  body  weigheth  down 
the  soul"  (ix.  15).  But  of  a  bodily  resurrection  he  says 
nothing.  Still,  when  we  link  his  doctrine  of  God's  love 
for  all  He  has  made,  and  the  thought  that  the  souls  of 
the  righteous  are  in  His  hand,  we  see  that  this  brilliant 
writer  is  moving  somewhat  ahead  of  his  ancient  people 
and  is  teaching  what  accentuates  and  emphasises  per- 
sonality. 

A  man's  doctrine  of  God  gives  us  his  centre;  this  man's 
treatment  of  the  Wisdom  of  God  is  significant,  and  it 
heralds  further  developments.  The  Stoics  taught  a 
divine  interpenetration  of  all  phenomena,  a  world-soul; 
it  was  the  heart  of  their  pantheism.  This  writer  felt 
the  attraction  of  their  language,  and  again  and  again  he 
emphasises  how  the  Spirit  of  the  Lord  fills  the  universe 
(i.  6,  7).  Upon  this  Spirit,  sometimes  called  Wisdom 
and  sometimes  the  Spirit  of  Wisdom,  he  heaps  one  beau- 
tiful phrase  after  another  (vii.  24  ff.)  : — 

There  is  in  her  a  spirit  of  understanding,  holy, 

Alone  in  kind,  manifold,  subtil,  freely  moving, 

Clear   in   utterance,   unpolluted,    distinct,   that   cannot    be 

harmed, 

Loving  what  is  good,  keen,  unhindered, 
Beneficent,  loving  toward  man, 


314  PROGRESS  IN  RELIGION 

Steadfast,  sure,  free  from  care, 

All  powerful,  all  surveying, 

And  penetrating  through  all  spirits  that  are  quick  of  under- 
standing, pure,  subtil; 

For  Wisdom  is  more  mobile  than  any  motion; 

Yea,  she  pervadeth  and  penetrateth  all  things  by  reason  of 
her  pureness. 

For  she  is  a  breath  of  the  power  of  God, 

And  a  clear  effluence  of  the  glory  of  the  Almighty; 

Therefore  can  nothing  defiled  find  entrance  into  her. 

For  she  is  an  effulgence  from  everlasting  light, 

And  an  unspotted  mirror  of  the  working  of  God, 

And  an  image  of  His  goodness. 

And  she,  though  but  one,  hath  power  to  do  all  things, 

And  remaining  in  herself  reneweth  all  things; 

And  from  generation  to  generation  passing  into  holy  souls 

She  maketh  them  friends  of  God  and  prophets.  .  .  . 

Being  compared  with  light  she  is  found  to  be  before  it.  ... 

She  reacheth  from  one  end  of  the  world  to  the  other  with 
full  strength, 

And  ordereth  all  things  well. 

No  one,  I  suppose,  could  fail  to  miss  the  influence  of 
Greek  thought  in  this  fine  passage.  Word  and  idea 
betray  it;  and,  as  with  Greek  thought  generally,  word 
and  idea  are  fruitful  and  inspire  the  writers  and  thinkers 
who  come  after.  But  no  one,  on  the  other  hand,  could 
mistake  the  passage  for  one  of  purely  Greek  origin;  the 
writer  is  a  Hebrew,  nursed  in  Hebrew  religion  and  full 
of  the  Hebrew's  passion  for  God.  Greek  and  Hebrew 
at  once,  he  speaks  of  the  future  of  the  world's  thinking; 
he  typifies  Alexander's  Marriage  of  Europe  and  Asia; 
and  when  the  universal  religion  came,  its  adherents  found 
in  him  phrase  and  conception  ready  to  express  their  own 
central  ideas  of  God. 

The  Jewish  world  was  not  all  of  one  texture — far 
from  it.  A  race  so  alive  must  show  great  divisions  of 
mind,  much  party  warfare.  Four  main  groups  are  out- 
standing— all  interesting,  at  once  in  their  initial  ideas 


JUDAISM  AFTER  ANTIOCHUS  315 

and  in  the  development  to  which  the  reaction  of  these 
ideas  and  of  the  circumstances  and  influences  of  the 
day  brought  them.  There  are  the  priestly  party,  the 
Pharisees,  the  Apocalyptic  writers  and  the  great  mass  of 
the  "Dispersion,"  influenced  variously  by  all  three  of 
them,  and  conscious  of  problems  of  its  own,  suggested 
by  its  Hellenistic  environment. 

After  the  exile  Jerusalem,  as  we  saw,  became  the  great 
centre  of  worship.  Here  stood  the  restored  Temple; 
here  alone  might  sacrifice  be  performed ;  here  the  priest- 
hood was  massed.  Here,  if  anywhere,  orthodox  Judaism 
should  have  been  found.  But  living  faiths  are  never  very 
orthodox,  or  orthodoxy  must  change  its  meaning.  The 
Mosaic  Law,  as  written,  re-written,  revised  and  com- 
bined, triumphed,  and  for  Jerusalem  the  last  word  in 
religion  was  said.  Consequently  at  Jerusalem  the  re- 
ligion loses  vitality.  Nationalism  is  not  always  a  pure 
and  unmixed  exaltation  of  the  human  spirit;  and  it  did 
not  cover  the  sins  of  the  Jerusalem  party.  They  held 
by  the  old  ways,  and  made  profit  out  of  them.  The  new, 
the  progressive,  the  spiritual  conception  of  religion  did 
not  appeal  to  them.  They  compromised  with  Hellenism 
on  its  secular  side,  and  missed  the  inspiration  which 
Greek  thought  gave  to  the  more  spiritually-minded.  We 
need  not  linger  with  them;  progress  in  religion  is  not 
here. 

The  decline  of  the  Maccabaean  patriot  clan  into 
tyranny  and  the  secularism  of  Jerusalem  provoked  what 
we  may  call  a  Puritan  reaction.  The  Hasidim  first  (the 
beloved,  the  pious,  or  the  saints)  and  the  Pharisees  later 
(the  separated)  stood  for  a  higher  type  of  religion. 
They  maintained  the  same  Law  of  God,  but  they  ap- 
proached it  from  a  different  angle.  They  were  more 
zealous  for  God,  less  careful  of  their  own  prerogative. 
The  Law  was  not  to  be  for  them  a  Magna  Chart  a  of 


316  PROGRESS  IN  RELIGION 

privilege  as  for  the  priestly  party;  it  was  the  revelation 
of  God  in  the  form  of  a  call  to  righteousness  and  piety. 
We  have  noticed  more  than  once  the  invincible  tendency 
in  religion,  apart  from  the  cults,  to  emphasise  righteous- 
ness; and  this  is  the  explanation  of  the  Pharisee  move- 
ment, and  it  carries  with  it  the  two  other  great  tendencies 
which  we  have  remarked.  For  the  Pharisees  righteous- 
ness had  its  centre  and  its  motive  in  a  personal  God  who 
required  it  of  the  human  individual  and  who  thereby 
recognised  and  emphasised  human  personality.  They 
are  the  successors  in  part  of  the  prophets,  inheritors  of 
everything  the  prophets  had,  their  first-hand  inspiration 
excepted  and  their  authentic  vision  of  God.  It  was  in 
the  Synagogue  rather  than  in  the  Temple  that  Pharisaism 
had  its  birthplace  and  its  home;  where  the  Prophets  as 
well  as  the  Law  were  read,  where  the  psalms  were  sung, 
where  religion  was  not  obscured  by  sacrifice  and  ritual. 
They  represented  in  measure  the  party  of  suffering,  the 
thinkers  for  whom  the  world  offers  problems  that  must 
be  solved,  men  who  live  for  something  not  visible. 
Where  religion  lives,  where  thought  is  still  trusted,  law 
is  less  dangerous  than  elsewhere,  and  for  long  it  is  clear 
that  Pharisaism  helped  to  develop  the  moral  sense  of 
the  Jewish  race,  to  quicken  their  thinking.  How  far  the 
Law  and  the  Prophets  had  thought  pre-eminently  of 
Israel  as  a  people,  and  how  far  they  had  recognised  the 
individual  and  his  life,  is  a  difficult  problem.  One  great 
part  of  the  work  of  the  Pharisees  was  to  individualise 
the  interpretation  of  both,  so  to  make  relevant  to  the 
individual  what  the  Prophets  had  taught  of  God  in  re- 
lation to  the  people,  as  to  develop  Judaism  into  one  of 
the  most  supremely  individualist  of  the  world's  religions, 
a  religion  where  God  and  man  come  close  together  as 
personalities,  intelligible  to  each  other.  The  Pharisees 


JUDAISM  AFTER  ANTIOCHUS  317 

were,  it  has  been  said,  "simply  Jews  in  the  superlative"  * 
as  the  Wahabis  are  the  true  Moslems. 

The  weak  spot  of  Pharisaism  was  the  closed  canon, 
the  holy  book  from  the  past,  the  document  susceptible 
of  interpretation  but  not  of  addition.  The  holy  book 
naturally  fell  into  the  hands  of  commentators,  and  origi- 
nality is  not  the  badge  of  that  tribe.  It  is  the  way  of 
the  commentator  to  make  claims  for  the  work  of  genius, 
that  genius  would  not  make.  The  Law  was  less,  far 
less,  the  work  of  genius  than  were  the  prophetic  writ- 
ings ;  and  it  was  on  the  Law  that  the  Scribe  chiefly  occu- 
pied himself.  Rabbi  and  Scribe  vied  in  paradox  to  exalt 
the  Law,  to  magnify  its  claim  upon  the  good  Jew,  till 
common  sense  reacted.  For  paradox  is  no  substitute 
for  genius,  and  it  rarely  means  insight  of  the  type  which 
greatly  helps  understanding  forward.  The  reaction 
of  common  sense  against  paradox  is  as  little  apt  to 
quicken  the  human  spirit  as  paradox  or  accumulative 
learning.  What  genius  Judaism  still  had  for  origination 
in  religion  found  vent  elsewhere,  and  was  rejected  at 
last — not  unintelligibly;  and  Judaism  settled  down  to 
common-sense  orthodoxy,  to  nationalism,  to  the  com- 
pleted book  and  the  closed  gates. 

Mr.  Claude  G.  Montefiore,  in  his  very  interesting  book 
entitled  Judaism  and  St.  Paul,  sketches  what,  from  avail- 
able Jewish  evidence  of  a  rather  later  date  than  the 
Christian  era,  he  conceives  to  have  been  the  Judaism  of 
Palestine  in  the  days  of  Paul.  If  he  should  prove  not 
to  have  been  warranted  in  this  thesis,  his  picture  will 
stand  as  faithful  to  a  later  stage;  and  whatever  the  date, 
it  serves  our  purpose  as  representing  the  outcome  of  this 
development  of  Hebrew  religion.  There  are  curious 
traits  in  the  picture;  but  Mr.  Montefiore's  very  evident 

9  Quoted  by  W.   Fairweather,  Background,  p.   138. 


318  PROGRESS  IN  RELIGION 

sympathy  with  the  type  of  mind  which  he  portrays  is  a 
guarantee  that  it  is  free  from  conscious  parody.  God 
was  the  creator  and  ruler  of  the  world,  and  at  the  same 
time  the  Father  of  Israel  and  of  every  Israelite  (p.  25) ; 
great  and  awful,  but  merciful  and  loving  (p.  26).  He 
did  not  delegate  His  relations  with  Israel  to  any  angel 
or  subordinate;  no  human  priest  obtruded  on  this  simple 
and  immediate  relation  of  God  and  every  Israelite  (p. 
26).  Israel's  belief  in  angels  was  highly  undogmatic 
(p.  27)  and  may  be  disregarded.  The  Law  was  given 
to  Israel  "as  a  means  by  which  happiness  and  goodness 
may  be  secured" — a  means  by  which  God  also  manifests 
His  own  Kingship  and  glory  (p.  28).  "It  was  the  grace 
of  God  which  was  made  visible  in  the  Law"  (p.  31). 
"To  the  Rabbinic  Jew,  who  conformed  to  average  and 
type,  the  observance  of  the  Law  was  in  no  wise  a  burden. 
How  should  it  be  so?  ...  He  has  told  you  to  fulfil 
certain  moral  and  ceremonial  laws  to  the  best  of  your 
ability  (p.  31)  ...  these  laws  are  His  laws,  and  in  the 
observance  of  them  you  will  find  satisfaction  and  joy, 
the  highest  life  on  earth  and  the  most  blissful  life  here- 
after. .  .  .  The  laws  were  not  a  burden  but  a  delight" 
(p.  3.2).  "They  were  indeed  taught  to  believe  that  the 
average  and  decent-living  Israelite  would  inherit  the 
world  to  come,  would  be  'saved,'  to  use  other  and  more 
familiar  phraseology.  But  they  were  not  taught  to  be- 
lieve that  this  result  wrould  follow  as  the  guerdon  of 
their  own  merits;  it  would  rather  befall  them  as  the  effect 
of  God's  love  and  God's  grace"  (pp.  35-6).  "God's  love 
for  Israel,  His  love  of  the  repentant  sinner,  His  invet- 
erate tendency  to  forgiveness,  together  with  the  merits 
of  the  patriarchs,  would  amply  make  up  for  their  own 
individual  deficiencies.  Their  religion  was,  therefore, 
happy  and  hopeful"  (p.  36).  "The  Rabbinic  Jew  did 
not  worry  himself  much  about  the  theory  that  the  whole 


JUDAISM  AFTER  ANTIOCHUS  319 

Law  (with  all  its  enactments)  has  to  be  obeyed.  He 
took  a  practical  view  of  the  situation.  .  .  .  There  is  no 
commandment  which  he  cannot  fulfil  more  or  less"  (pp. 
41-2).  "But  is  not  God  angry  at  man's  violation  of  the 
Law?  Yes,  He  is  very  angry.  .  .  .  Let  a  man  repent 
but  a  very  little  and  God  will  forgive  very  much.  .  .  . 
The  Day  of  Atonement  is  the  day  on  which  both  man 
and  God  are,  so  to  speak,  engaged  in  doing  nothing  else 
than  repentance  and  forgiveness"  (pp.  42,  43).  "Sal- 
vation was  the  privilege  of  every  Israelite  who,  believing 
in  God  and  in  His  Law,  tried  to  do  his  best,  and  was 
sorry  for  his  failures  and  his  lapses"  (p.  77). 

Mr.  Montefiore  rather  enjoys  explaining  that  these 
Rabbinic  Jews  were  "not  theorists  and  had  little  phi- 
losophy" (p.  79).  It  was  "a  joyous,  simple  religion: 
yet  also  an  intellectual  and  rational  religion  in  its  own 
special  way  .  .  .  but  not  a  religion  which  passed  con- 
stantly and  rapidly  into  mysticism,  a  religion  more 
usually  (to  use  the  now  familiar  words  of  William 
James)  of  the  'healthy-minded'  and  of  the  'once-born' 
.  .  .  without  sacraments  and  without  mysteries.  It  knew 
of  no  rapid  change  from  bad  to  good  by  any  secret  initia- 
tion or  any  second  and  higher  birth"  (pp.  48-50).  The 
Jew  gave  up  the  search  for  proselytes;  "but  what  I  am 
most  keen  to  emphasise  is  that  this  indifference,  dislike, 
contempt,  particularism — this  ready  and  not  unwilling 
consignment  of  the  non-believer  and  the  non-Jew  to  per- 
dition and  gloom — was  quite  consistent  with  the  most 
passionate  religious  faith  and  with  the  most  exquisite 
and  delicate  charity"  (p.  56).  This  remarkable  sentence 
is  a  sort  of  Rosetta  stone  that  gives  us  a  clue  to  Mr. 
Montefiore's  language.  The  Judaism  of  the  Dispersion 
he  believes  to  have  been  inferior  to  the  Rabbinic  type, 
"more  anxious  and  pessimistic,  more  sombre  and  per- 
plexed" (p.  114).  "Hellenistic  Judaism  .  .  .  had  to 


320  PROGRESS  IN  RELIGION 

look  outwards  rather  than  inwards,  and  began  to  invent 
theories  and  justifications  of  its  religion  instead  of  ac- 
cepting it  as  a  delightful  matter  of  course.  .  .  .  Some 
of  them  may  have  begun  to  worry  about  their  salvation 
and  the  'state  of  their  soul'  "  (pp.  96-7) ;  they  were  "dis- 
posed to  take  a  gloomy  view  of  the  universal  domination 
of  sin"  (p.  98).  They  would  not  take  their  religion  for 
granted;  and  there,  Mr.  Montefiore  holds,  lay  their  error. 
"Directly  you  have  to  justify  a  thing,  it  becomes  a  little 
external;  you  hold  it  at  arm's  length  and  examine  it 
curiously.  If  you  live  with  it,  and  grow  with  it,  and 
accept  it  as  a  matter  of  course,  you  love  it  without  asking 
why,  and  it  becomes  a  part  of  your  own  very  self.  You 
do  not  compare  it  with  anything  else.  It  is  just  your 
own,  a  sheer  privilege  and  delight.  Perhaps  the 
Hellenistic  Jew  was  too  much  surrounded  by  other  people 
to  feel  like  that  about  the  Law"  (p.  99).  And  the  God 
of  the  Rabbinic  Jew  was  very  like  him — "very  personal 
'and  childlike;  He  did  not  care  for  system  and  theories; 
but  at  all  events  He  was  always  there  when  wanted,  and 
He  managed  His  own  affairs  Himself.  He  loved  and 
was  loved.  The  grandiose  conceptions  of  the  Apocalyptic 
seers,  and  the  influence  of  Greek  philosophy  made  Him 
more  august  and  majestic,  but  less  gentle  and  kindly" 
(P-  95)-  Paul's  universalism  "probably  needed  the 
stimulus  of  external  and  non-Jewish  influences"  (p  82). 
"The  author  of  the  4th  book  of  Ezra  gives  up  the  whole 
question  of  the  heathen  as  an  impossibly  hopeless  puzzle. 
'Touching  man  in  general,  Thou  knowest  best,  but  touch- 
ing Thy  people  I  will  speak!'"  (p.  no). 

It  is  a  curious  story.  Rabbinic  Judaism  was  heir  to 
the  Law  and  the  Prophets;  it  inherited  other  gains  of 
seer  and  thinker;  but  it  rested  on  the  fact  achieved,  it 
refused  Hellenism — provoked,  no  doubt,  by  persecutions 
and  by  war,  and  it  refused  progress.  On  Mr.  Monte- 


JUDAISM  AFTER  ANTIOCHUS  321 

fiore's  own  showing,  it  escaped  the  harassment  of 
thought,  it  would  not  wrestle  with  problems ;  it  was  con- 
tented with  an  easy-natured  parochial  God,  and  it  dis- 
missed the  great  world  to  damnation,  while  Israel  and 
his  God  moved  about  on  the  surfaces  of  things,  content 
to  compromise  on  an  easy-going  morality. 

But,  dismissing  criticism,  we  cannot  help  noting  that 
Rabbinic  Judaism  did  not  historically  do  much  to  in- 
fluence the  world's  thinking.  Like  modern  Parsi-ism,  it 
was  the  religion  of  a  small  community,  racially  and  re- 
ligiously closed.  Israel's  religious  ideas  as  expressed  by 
Prophet  and  Psalmist  have  had  an  incalculably  great 
effect;  they  still  exert  an  influence  beyond  computing. 
The  successors  of  Prophet  and  Psalmist  include  indeed 
the  Scribes  and  those  who  gave  its  grandeur  to  syna- 
gogue religion,  and  made,  as  we  have  seen,  a  great  con- 
tribution to  mankind;  but  more  interesting  to  scholars 
for  the  moment  are  the  writers  of  Apocalyptic  books. 
It  is  more  than  possible  that  the  significance  of  Apoca- 
lyptic is  being  exaggerated;  Professor  A.  B.  Bruce  indeed 
held  that  "the  great  heart  of  humanity  has  only  one  duty 
to  perform  towards  it,  and  that  is  to  consign  it  to  ob- 
livion." 10  Whatever  attention  we  pay  to  it,  we  have  to 
remember  that  it  was  the  Jews  of  the  Restoration  and 
their  successors  in  the  synagogues  who  established  the 
first  real  Monotheism,  who  claimed  all  for  spiritual  re- 
ligion, who  set  worship  free  from  the  external  and  the 
obsolete,  and  concentrated  the  mind  of  the  worshipper 
on  God  and  the  human  soul  and  righteousness.  All  that 
the  Apocalyptist  did  was  to  develop  this — not  in  the 
lettered  and  scholarly  way  of  the  Scribe,  but  more  as  a 
poet  would — a  poet  of  broken  wing. 

Once  again,  we  have  to  look  at  the  environment — at 
the  unhappy  land  of  Palestine,  the  thoroughfare  of  rival 

10  A.  B.  Bruce,  Apologetics,  p.  293. 


322  PROGRESS  IN  RELIGION 

kings  of  Egypt  and  Syria  as  of  old,  at  the  growing  chaos 
and  meaninglessness  of  the  world  in  the  last  two  cen- 
turies before  Christ,  at  the  helpless  posture  of  true  re- 
ligion between  Seleucids,  Herods,  and  Romans  without 
and  false  friends  within,  liberators  turned  tyrants,  and 
priests  proved  secular-hearted.  Once  again  there  was 
much  to  endure,  much  to  explain ;  and,  as  in  such  times, 
questions  were  asked;  religion  needed  "theories  and  jus- 
tifications" if  it  was  to  go  on;  Antiochus  was  too  serious 
a  problem  to  leave  religion  "a  delightful  matter  of 
course";  the  thinker  had  once  more  to  justify  the  ways 
of  God  to  men,  and  it  was  no  easy  task. 

The  questions  were  the  old  ones  that  have  haunted 
Greek  and  Hindu  thinkers,  that  perplex  us  still.  Why 
does  God  forsake  His  people  and  cease  to  be  gracious? 
Is  the  fault  in  God?  Is  His  arm  shortened?  Has  He 
grown  obsolete  and  inefficient  among  the  mailed  fists  and 
the  cultured  dynasties  of  a  later  day?  Is  the  religion, 
in  plain  fact,  an  absurdity,  a  falsity?  Or  is  the  fault 
elsewhere?  is  it  in  Israel?  Has  Israel  as  a  nation  failed 
in  the  loyalty  to  Jehovah  that  would  merit  or  control 
His  support?  Was  the  nation  itself  a  hopeless  dream; 
and,  if  so,  what  was  left  for  the  individual?  What 
explained  his  private  pain,  the  failure  of  his  hopes,  the 
vanity  of  his  life,  his  intolerable  solitude  in  a  world 
where  Prophet  and  Psalmist  had  promised  the  presence 
of  God?  Death  swept  heedlessly  over  the  land;  good 
and  evil  fell  unreckoned ;  and  Gentiles  were  talking  more 
and  more  of  Chance  ruling  all;  were  they  right?  All 
this  meant,  as  we  have  seen  before,  a  fresh  emphasis  on 
individual  personality;  and  every  such  fresh  emphasis  is 
apt  to  mean  real  progress  in  Religion. 

The  first  and  most  obvious  feature  about  all  this 
Apocalyptic  literature  is  that  none  of  it  was  written  by 


JUDAISM  AFTER  ANTIOCHUS  323 

the  men  whose  names  it  bears.11  The  authors  were  not 
Enoch  and  Ezra,  to  name  those  to  whom  more  books 
were  attributed  than  to  any  others.  The  canon  of  the 
Old  Testament  was  closed,  and  men  mistrusted  fresh 
revelations;  neither  they  nor  their  contemporaries,  they 
felt,  were  the  sort  of  mouth-pieces  that  God  would  use. 
Consequently,  when  a  man  had  a  message,  he  gave  it  to 
the  world,  not  like  the  old  Prophets,  as  what  the  Lord 
had  spoken  to  him,  but  as  a  revelation  made  long  since 
in  the  days  of  miracle  and  prophecy  to  one  of  those 
great  figures  of  Jewish  history  like  Moses  or  Ezra,  or  of 
world-history  like  Enoch,  to  whom  it  was  more  credible 
that  God  would  show  His  mind.  The  books  had  been 
mislaid,  or  (better)  had  been  preserved  as  mysterious 
and  secret  literature,  and  now  came  to  light  with  pro- 
phetic teaching  wonderfully  opposite  to  the  present  pos- 
ture of  affairs.  As  literature  Apocalyptic  is  trivial;  its 
permanent  contribution  to  thought  is  slight — facts  proved 
by  the  wholesale  neglect  which  overtook  its  products. 
Judaism  by  and  by  would  have  none  of  it;  indeed  Pro- 
fessor F.  C.  Burkitt  goes  so  far  as  to  say  that  Judaism 
succeeded  in  surviving  because  the  Jews  dropped  the  con- 
viction that  had  produced  the  Apocalypses.12  No  one 
who  had  ever  enjoyed  a  Greek  book  could  find  any 
pleasure  (let  us  say)  in  Enoch  as  literature.  Enoch  is 
not  a  book;  it  is  a  medley  of  bits  of  books;  or,  if  it  is 
not,  it  has  lost  its  one  apology.  It  is" iterative,  inconsecu- 
tive, absurd,  tasteless,  and  trivial,  but  it  has  its  interest 
as  a  magazine  of  what  mankind  has  been  content  to 
forget,  a  curiosity  shop  of  folklore,  fancy,  history  inter- 
preted, forecast  and  allegory.13  But  Enoch,  as  some  of 

11  Cf.  the  curious  episode  of  the  discovery  of  the  Books  of  Numa,  Livy,  xl. 
29;  Warde  Fowler,  R.E.R.P.,  p.  349. 

12  Burkitt,  Schweich  Lectures,   1913,  p.   15. 

13  "A   logical   Apocalypse,"   as   Prof.    Burkitt   says,   "would   most   likely   be   a 
dull    Apocalypse"    (Schweich   Lectures,    1913,   p.    49).      They    are   dull    enough 
without  logic. 


324  PROGRESS  IN  RELIGION 

the  minor  writers  of  the  New  Testament  remind  us, 
offered  more  than  the  shadow  of  a  borrowed  name;  it 
purported  to  reveal  God's  purposes,  and  something  in  its 
story  appealed  to  men's  sense  of  the  fitness  of  things. 
Thus  Apocalyptic,  too,  will  serve  us  as  a  guide  to  the 
movements  of  thought.  The  personality  of  God,  the 
claims  of  man's  personality,  the  fundamental  righteous- 
ness of  the  universe — the  beliefs  to  which  we  have  seen 
men  moving  with  steady  intensity,  these  are  still  the  mag- 
nets which  group  the  workings  of  man's  mind. 

The  great  problem  was  God.  Apocalyptic  was  an 
attempt  to  get  that  problem  cleared.  The  very  fact  that 
God  cared  enough  for  men  to  communicate  to  Enoch 
a  sort  of  philosophy  of  history  was  evidence  of  God — 
of  His  existence,  of  the  quality  of  His  mind,  of  His 
providence.  Tiresome  as  we,  the  pupils  of  Greece,  find 
all,  or  nearly  all,  this  literature — for  the  Book  of  the 
Secrets  of  Enoch,  if  it  is  Jewish  at  all,14  must  be  excepted 
— it  presupposes  God  as  a  thinking,  planning,  provident 
being;  God  "geometrises"  again,  as  Plato  said.  The 
universe  is  not  a  rather  meaningless  cycle  of  cause  and 
effect,  wheeled  into  chaos  and  out  of  it  by  a  force  that 
is  as  nearly  non-moral  and  non-intelligent  as  so  great  a 
power  could  be.  God,  not  Necessity,  is  at  the  head  of  it, 
at  the  heart  of  it;  and  He  is  interested  enough  in  His 
creatures — the  sentient,  thinking,  suffering  children  of 
Israel — to  explain  to  them  through  His  saints  and  His 
chosen  something  of  the  mystery  of  a  universe  of  tears 
and  death. 

One  constant  feature  in  Apocalyptic  is  its  emphasis  on 
history.  Fanciful  as  the  Apocalyptist  may  be — and  wild 
exuberant  fancy  plays  too  large  a  part  in  his  work — he 
is  apt  to  base  himself  upon  the  recorded  experience  of 
man  and  of  Israel.  Using  or  seeming  to  use  the  future 

14  It  is  said  to  be  of  Slavonic  origin  and  mediaeval  in  date. 


JUDAISM  AFTER  ANTIOCHUS  325 

tense  he  tells  over  and  over  again  the  story  of  the  Jewish 
race, 

immense 
With  witnessings  of  Providence. 

Jewish  writers,  from  the  Chronicler  downwards,  had 
retold  their  national  history,  they  had  recast  it,  to  bring 
out  its  moral  value,  and  the  Apocalyptists  did  it  once 
more.  God  is  justified  in  all  the  story  which  the  reader 
identifies  as  behind  him,  and  a  presumption  is  created 
that,  in  the  remainder  of  the  story,  to  be  unfolded  in  the 
future,  God  will  again  be  justified.  The  troubles  of 
Israel  in  the  past  were  largely  of  his  own  making,  the 
outcome  of  his  unfaithfulness;  but  not  always,  for  God 
had  purposes  of  testing  and  discipline,  a  design  to  prove 
who  are  indeed  His  faithful  and  to  develop  them. 
Hence,  and  the  deduction  follows  naturally  in  a  tale  of 
one  texture  and  one  tense,  it  may  be  taken  that  the 
troubles  of  the  present,  so  faithfully  foreseen  thousands 
of  years  ago  by  the  great  antediluvian  or  the  national 
hero  or  the  great  regenerator,  have  the  same  value ;  they 
are  not  accident  nor  evidence  of  the  failure  of  God. 

The  Wisdom  literature  affords  an  interesting  parallel 
here.  Proverbs,  Job,  Ecclesiastes,  Ecclesiasticus,  show 
minds  wrestling  with  the  problem  of  individual  suffer- 
ing. There  is  the  simple  assertion  that  there  is  no  prob- 
lem; all  is  straightforward  (Prov.  xii.  21;  xiii.  21); 
and  there  is  as  direct  an  assertion  that  there  is  no  solu- 
tion (Eccles.).  Do  the  sinners'  children  suffer,  and  they 
righteous?  (Eccles.  xi.  28;  Job  v.  4;  xxi.  19;  xxvii.  14). 
Would  that  be  just?  It  is  the  question  of  the  prophets, 
who  had  to  deal  with  the  popular  proverb  of  the  parents 
eating  sour  grapes  and  the  children's  teeth  set  on  edge 
(Jer.  xxxi.  29;  Ezek.  xviii.  2).  But  is  punishment  dis- 
ciplinary, if-  the  sinner  escape  and  the  innocent  children 
suffer?  Another  theory  was  that  the  wicked  had  his 


326  PROGRESS  IN  RELIGION 

punishment  on  the  day  of  his  death  (Eccles.  xi.  26)— 
a  desperate  solution,  without  evidence  or  likelihood,  and 
affording  loopholes,  but  a  proof  of  the  seriousness  of 
the  interest  in  the  question.  The  writer  of  Job  takes 
refuge  in  God,  author  of  the  world  and  of  its  beauty, 
and  implies,  if  not  exactly  a  future  life,  yet  an  assurance 
of  something  after  death  to  verify  the  reality  of  re- 
ligion.15 

To  all  this  discussion  the  Apocalyptists  were  heirs,  and 
they  offered  a  series  of  new  propositions,  which  are 
rather  difficult  to  fit  into  any  system,  and  some  of  which 
show  ideas  marked  by  an  advance  on  anything  in  the 
Old  Testament.  The  Greek  doctrine  of  the  immortality 
of  the  soul  is  adopted,  and  gradually  it  is  discovered  to 
be  the  very  crux  and  centre  of  the  discussion.  Clearness 
was  no  ambition  of  the  Apocalyptic  school,  but  it  is  an 
intellectual  necessity  which  we  have  inherited  from  the 
Greeks.  So  that,  without  going  minutely  into  detail,  or 
considering  various  writers  in  particular,  we  may  look 
first  at  the  work  of  the  school  on  the  future  of  Israel  and 
then  at  its  thoughts  upon  the  individual  and  his  destiny. 

First,  as  to  the  Nation.  God,  to  be  faithful,  must 
fulfil  His  promises  to  the  chosen  race.  He  had  always 
kept  faith  in  the  past;  He  had  called  His  son  from 
Egypt,  He  had  redeemed  him  from  Babylon.  Then  it  is 
clear  that  the  Lord  will  have  mercy  on  Zion  yet  and  will 
restore  the  kingdom  to  Israel;  David  will  perhaps  re- 
turn.16 The  triumph  of  the  early  Maccabaeans  tended 
to  bring  the  kingdom  well  into  sight,  as  a  possibility  in 
the  land  of  Palestine  itself,  but  the  character  of  later 
Maccabaean  rule  relegated  the  kingdom  to  heaven,  or  to 
some  strange  age  and  condition,  and  made  it  the  future 
work  of  another  Anointed  one,  no  Maccabaean,  but  a 

IB  See  W.   Fairweather,  Background  of  Gospels,  pp.  82,  90. 
16  J.  P.  Peters,  Religion  of  the  Hebrews,  p.  428. 


JUDAISM  AFTER  ANTIOCHUS  327 

greater  altogether.  Nearer  or  further  away,  a  fluctuat- 
ing hope,  the  dream  is  a  register  of  the  moods  of  Israel, 
a  register  too  of  progress  in  religious  ideas.  The  Mes- 
siah's kingdom  will  be  an  earthly  Paradise,  to  which  the 
dead  return  with  bodies  given  them  to  fit  them  for  its 
mundane  joys.  But  that  again  will  not  serve ;  it  is  spirit- 
ualised, and  dead  and  living  alike  will  receive  spiritual 
bodies,  whatever  they  are.  Then  the  kingdom  is  trans- 
ferred to  heaven;  quick  and  dead  are  to  be  absent  from 
the  body ;  but  how  are  you  to  reconcile  this  with  the  other 
solutions  ? 17  David  and  the  Messiah,  the  kingdom  on 
earth,  the  kingdom  in  Heaven,  resurrection,  immortality 
— the  ideas  are  disparate  enough,  and  the  Jewish  ideas 
among  them  begin  to  be  overborne  by  the  Greek;  and 
all  are  crossed  with  the  problem  of  justice,  the  sin  of  the 
individual,  his  righteousness  and  the  claims  which  it 
gives  him  on  God;  and  perhaps  after  all  the  kingdom 
will  not  be  a  mere  national  affair,  nor  can  be,  but  must 
be  universal.  Then  is  it  a  kingdom  any  more  ?  or  is  the 
idea  wanted?  Will  not  immortality  serve? 

The  Messiah,  too,  is  a  problem — David  or  not  David, 
or  not  even  Davidic?  Some  Apocalyptic  writers  have 
no  place  for  him;  the  writers  of  the  Assumption  of 
Moses,  of  Wisdom,  of  Fourth  Maccabees,  Fourth  Esdras 
and  Second  Baruch  ignore  him.  The  Book  of  Jubilees 
recognises  him,  but  not  as  of  primary  import,  while  the 
Similitudes  of  Enoch  give  him  high  significance.  The 
writer  of  these,  whose  work  is  incorporated  in  Enoch 
(chapters  xxxvii.-lxxi.),  and  who  lived  perhaps  between 
94  and  64  B.C.,  gives  us  the  high-water  mark  of  Apoca- 
lyptic teaching  on  the  Messiah.  He  is  described  as  the 
Righteous  One  (xxxviii.  2;  liii.  6)  ;  the  Elect  (xl.  5 ;  xlv. 
3,  4)  ;  and  the  Son  of  Man  (Ixii.  14) — all  titles  that 
reappear  in  the  New  Testament.  He  possesses  Right- 

17  J.  H.  Leckie,  World  to  Come,  p.  30. 


328  PROGRESS  IN  RELIGION 

eousness  and  it  dwells  with  Him  (xlvi.  3)  ;  he  has  seven- 
fold gifts  (xlix.  3;  Ixii.  2);  Wisdom  is  in  him  (xlii.), 
the  Spirit  of  Him  who  gives  knowledge  (xlix.  3)  and 
the  Spirit  of  power  (xlix.  3).  He  is  the  revealer  of  all 
things,  He  will  recall  to  life  the  dead  who  are  in  Sheol 
and  hell  (li.  i;  Ixi.  5);  he  will  be  Judge  (Ixix.  7;  li.  2; 
Iv.  4;  Ixi.  8;  Ixii.  2,  3) ;  he  slays  sinners  and  unrighteous 
with  the  word  of  his  mouth  (Ixii.  2).™ 

That  the  idea  of  the  Messiah  rooted  itself  in  popular 
imagination  was  in  measure  due  to  thinkers  and  writers 
who  conceived  of  the  Messiah  so  nobly.  That  it  did,  is 
evident  from  the  Gospels  and  from  the  history  of  those 
two  unhappy  centuries  of  relations  with  Rome  which 
end  with  Bar-Cochba  (c.  117  A.D.).  But  it  is  conceivable 
that,  if  Jesus  had  not  adopted  or  accepted  the  title,  and 
given  it  a  wholly  new  value  derived  from  his  own  per- 
sonality, the  very  idea  might  have  perished.  For,  despite 
the  glowing  language  quoted  from  Enoch,  it  was  hard 
for  thinkers  to  explain  to  themselves  that  a  Messiah  was 
really  needed  for  the  tasks  assigned  to  him  by  Apoca- 
lyptic writers  and  by  popular  enthusiasm.  Certainly 
political  Messiahs  were  long  since  a  conspicuous  mistake, 
disastrous  to  the  nation  and  indeed  a  negation  of  its 
true  spiritual  life.  Even  after  the  rescue  of  the  idea  by 
Jesus,  it  was  transformed  by  its  fusion  with  the  Greek 
idea  of  the  Logos,  to  which  Philo  had  given  a  Jewish 
tinge  without  obscuring  its  Greek  origin  and  meaning; 
and  it  is  a  question  whether  Logos  or  Messiah  has  been 
the  more  fruitful  name  for  Jesus  of  Nazareth.  In  any 
case  he  only  distantly  resembled  the  popular  conception 
of  the  Messiah.  Once  again  the  Greek  doctrine  of  Im- 
mortality cut  across  the  national  imagination.  If  all  men 
are  immortal,  if  justice  is  in  any  case  done  to  all  men 

18  See  R.  H.  Charles  (to  whom  I  owe  the  collection  of  these  references), 
Book  of  Enoch,  Intr.  p.  cix. ;  and  index,  s.v.  Messiah;  and  also  his  Eschatology, 
pp.  260-264. 


JUDAISM  AFTER  ANTIOCHUS  329 

in  some  world  beyond,  what  place  and  function  is  there 
for  a  Messiah?  That  Jesus  found  worth  in  the  idea  is 
a  hint  to  us,  as  it  was  to  his  followers,  to  re-think  it; 
but,  as  so  often  in  his  teaching,  the  borrowed  idea  re- 
ceives so  many  new  values,  that  it  is  hard  to  dissociate 
it  from  them  and  to  realise  how  much  more  was  done 
for  it  by  the  borrower  than  by  the  originators. 

Immortality — that  is  the  conception  to  which  all  these 
national  hopes  and  dreams,  and  visions  of  God,  had  to 
be  adjusted.  It  becomes  the  touchstone  of  men's  ideas 
of  God.  There  is  very  little  about  it  in  the  Old  Testa- 
ment; the  nation,  not  the  individual,  was  the  main  prob- 
lem of  those  writers,  though  Jeremiah  (as  we  have  seen) 
has  grasped  that  the  real  crux  is  the  individual.  But  the 
idea  gains  ground,  and  we  watch  it  make  its  way  in 
Jewish  thought,  adjusted  as  best  may  be  to  Jewish 
views,  but  slowly  transforming  them.  All  Israelites  are 
to  rise  (i  Enoch  li.  i  f.) — or  rather  the  Just  alone 
(i  Enoch  Ixxxiii.-xc. ;  xii.  Testaments) — or,  better,  all 
mankind  (4  Esdras,  2  Baruch).  Then  it  is  transcenden- 
talised;  the  body  and  its  resurrection  recede  in  interest, 
and  the  emphasis  falls  on  the  soul.  It  swings  clear  of 
Messiahs  and  Messianic  Kingdoms,  yes,  and  of  Jewish 
nationality.  Sheol  is  progressively  moralised;  Righteous- 
ness invades  the  grave  and  brings  it  also  into  order. 
Reward  and  Punishment  do  not  turn  on  race,  just  as 
Right  and  Wrong  are  not  local  or  racial  but  universal. 
"If  I  make  my  bed  in  Sheol,  behold,  thou  art  there" 
(Ps.  cxxxix.  8). 

Thus  once  more  the  Individual  claims  his  own  in  re- 
ligion ;  he  must  have  Immortality  for  himself  or  for  his 
child,  and  the  proper  consequences  of  his  acts,  his  life 
and  character.  Righteousness  has  asserted  itself  against 
nationalism;  the  new  aeon  will  not  be  a  mere  reign  of 
Israel,  it  will  be  a  triumph  of  God,  and  it  will  be  shared 


330  PROGRESS  IN  RELIGION 

by  every  man  and  woman  who  has  been  loyal  to  God. 
The  writer  of  Ecclesiastes  might  sneer  all  this  away,  but 
mankind  was  against  him;  and  the  harassing  experience 
of  Israel  reasserted  and  proved  again  the  force  of  the 
impulse  that  drives  men  to  emphasise  human  individu- 
ality and  Righteousness,  and  God  the  author  and  the 
guarantee  of  both. 


XV 

THE  VICTORY  OF  THE  ORIENT 

IN  a  famous  passage  Milton  pictures  the  delights  of 
reading  the  philosophy  of  the  ancients: — 

Or  let  my  Lamp  at  midnight  hour 
Be  seen  in  some  high  lonely  tower, 
Where  I  may  oft  out- watch  the  Bear, 
With  thrice  great  Hermes,  or  unsphear 
The  spirit  of  Plato  to  unfold 
What  Worlds,  or  what  vast  Regions  hold 
The  immortal  mind  that  hath  forsook 
Her  mansion  in  this  fleshly  nook: 
And  of  those  Daemons  that  are  found 
In  fire,  air,  flood,  or  under  ground, 
Whose  power  hath  a  true  consent 
With  Planet  or  with  Element. 

The  linking  of  Plato  with  Hermes  Trismegistus  strikes 
the  modern  reader  oddly,  but  for  a  long  time  after  the 
Renaissance  (as  The  Faerie  Queene  shows)  Plato  was 
read  with  the  eyes  of  the  Neo-Platonists;  and  our  pas- 
sage sums  up  a  great  deal  of  the  thinking  of  the  early 
centuries  of  our  era.  The  immortality  of  the  soul, 
daemons  of  air  and  underground,  planets  and  elements, 
and  their  "consent"  with  human  affairs,  are  features  of 
religion,  some  of  which  seem  to  have  little  affinity  either 
with  Plato  or  with  each  other.  Hermes  Trismegistus, 
too,  with  people  who  preferred  dogma  and  the  dimness 
of  fancy  to  clear  thought,  perhaps  even  outweighed 
Plato.  Fancy,  ritual,  mysticism,  unsound  science,  are 

triumphant  for  the  time,  and  are  united  in  a  tremendous 

331 


332  PROGRESS  IN  RELIGION 

campaign  against  truth  and  sense.  The  Victory  of 
the  Orient  over  Western  thinkers  is  the  subject  be- 
fore us — a  dismal  chapter  in  the  history  of  religious 
thought. 

Centuries  of  war  in  the  Eastern  Mediterranean  worked 
for  what  Otto  Seeck  has  called  the  "extermination  of 
the  best."  The  very  factor  which,  it  is  said,  has  retarded 
the  development  of  the  negro  over  millenniums,  brought 
about  the  degradation  of  the  Greek  and  his  neighbours. 
Independent  political  thinking  in  a  Greek  city,  any  sense 
of  individual  responsibility,  ambition,  capacity,  marked 
a  man  down.  In  war  or  civic  tumult  such  a  man  was 
liable  to  be  cut  off,  and  his  influence  and  spirit  were 
lost,  while  the  humdrum  and  the  cautious  survived.  It 
was  a  bad  effect  of  Alexander's  conquest  of  the  world, 
and  of  the  great  empires  of  his  successors,  that  govern- 
ment and  civil  service  usurped  more  and  more  of  the 
proper  activities  of  mankind.  Authority  is  very  well  in 
its  place,  but  it  is  never  content  with  its  place,  and  it 
becomes  as  dangerous  to  human  development  as  Anarchy. 
"True  Art's  a  Republic's,"  says  Browning  in  a  poem  of 
desperate  rhymes.  We  have  already  seen  how  decline 
overtakes  Art,  Thought,  Poetry,  everything  that  needs 
independence  of  mind,  as  the  successors  of  Alexander 
and  the  Romans  in  turn  tighten  their  grip  on  mankind. 
The  world  went  through  a  long  period  of  imitation  and 
dictionary-making;  collection  of  extracts  and  universal 
histories  compiled  without  criticism  were  favourite  forms 
of  literature.  In  crafts  and  manufactures  the  same 
holds.  Slavery  was  more  naked  and  undisguised  there, 
and  it  is  noted  that  for  centuries  there  was  no  improve- 
ment in  tools — a  sure  sign  that  progress  generally  will 
be  slight.  Why  should  a  slave  improve  his  tools? 
Slavery,  in  one  form  or  another,  e.g.  the  colonate  and 


THE  VICTORY  OF  THE  ORIENT          333 

serfdom,  strengthened  its  hold  on  society.1  Why  should 
a  man  think,  when  thinking  makes  him  suspect  with  the 
government,  and  when  there  is  no  Switzerland  or  Hol- 
land to  which  he  can  go  ?  Constant  pressure  from  above 
deadened  the  mind,  and  men  slipped  to  lower  levels  of 
intelligence. 

We  have  already  seen  how  Sextus  Empiricus  compares 
the  Greek  painter,  who  in  disgust  threw  his  sponge  at 
his  picture,  and  by  despair  achieved  what  he  could  not 
by  art,  with  the  Sceptic,  who,  failing  to  find  peace  in 
thought,  abandoned  thought  in  disgust,  and  suddenly 
was  surprised  to  find  that  he  was  at  peace.  That  is  not 
the  mood  of  the  early  Sophists;  there  was  a  gaiety,  a 
truculence  of  youth,  about  their  procedure;  their  doubt 
took  the  form  of  challenge  and  emancipation.  This  later 
scepticism  is  sheer  fatigue ;  but  fatigue  does  not  eliminate 
fear,  and  it  is  a  fertile  field  for  superstition.  Fatigue 
invades  every  branch  of  thought  in  that  Graeco-Roman 
world.  The  science  of  Eratosthenes  ebbs  away  in  the 
note-books  of  Seneca,  Pliny  and  Plutarch;  quotation  and 
guess-work  replace  observation  and  thought.  Authority 
triumphs  in  religion,  because,  like  the  throwing  of  the 
sponge,  it  seems  to  achieve  what  intellectual  effort  can- 
not. Meanwhile  the  steady  resolve  of  the  governments 
that  men  shall  have  no  outlet  for  energy  in  this  world 
perhaps  contributed  to  turn  their  minds  to  another  world 
— but  minds  tired  and  timid,  no  longer  qualified  nor 
wishful  to  handle  evidence  for  what  they  dealt  in, 
anxious  for  safety,  and  ready  to  find  it  in  eclecticism, 
the  subtlest  form  of  scepticism. 

The  great  characteristic  feature  of  Oriental  religion  as 
it  sweeps  over  the  Roman  Empire  is,  as  we  saw,  its 

1  Cf.  W.  E.  Heitland,  Agricola,  p.  425,  on  the  steps  to  serfdom;  p.  436, 
"step  by  step  they  sink  under  the  loss  of  effective  freedom,  though  nominally 
free,  bound  down  by  economic  and  social  forces;  influences  that  operate  with 
the  slow  certainty  of  fate  until  their  triumph  is  finally  registered  by  imperial 
law." 


334  PROGRESS  IN  RELIGION 

vagueness.  The  Greek  had  never  had  as  close  a  knowl- 
edge of  Egyptian,  Persian  or  Phrygian  religion  as  he 
supposed;  still  less  the  Roman.  "When  the  eclectic 
Plutarch,"  says  Cumont,2  "speaks  of  the  character  of 
the  Egyptian  gods,  he  finds  it  agrees  surprisingly  with 
his  own  philosophy";  and  we  may  interpose  that  Plu- 
tarch's philosophy  was  a  pious  impressionism,  as  little 
thought  out  as  it  was  emotional  and  respectable;  and 
lamblichus  found  the  same  freedom.  "The  hazy  ideas 
of  the  Oriental  priests  enabled  every  one  to  see  in  them 
the  phantoms  he  was  pursuing,"  is  Cumont's  summary. 
"The  individual  imagination  was  given  ample  scope,  and 
the  dilettantic  men  of  letters  rejoiced  in  moulding  those 
malleable  doctrines  at  will.  .  .  .  The  gods  were  every- 
thing and  nothing;  they  got  lost  in  a  sfumato."  Fog  is 
religion's  vital  breath  in  this  period.  Modern  Hinduism, 
in  very  much  the  same  mood  of  fear  and  reaction,  ex- 
hibits at  once  the  advantages  and  disadvantages  of  a 
religion,  which  is  anything  you  like  to  make  it  except 
monotheism,  or  even  monotheism  in  a  sense  that  makes 
it  meaningless,  while  it  is  never  anything  that  you  can 
either  grasp  or  criticise.  Whatever  feature  strikes  the 
Western  observer  as  objectionable  or  of  doubtful  value, 
is  sure  not  to  be  Hinduism ;  even  caste,  you  will  be  told, 
is  not  Hinduism;  what  actually  is  Hinduism,  you  are 
less  likely  to  learn,  unless  it  is  virtue  and  spiritual  sen- 
sitiveness beyond  European  standards.  Oriental  religion, 
as  Greek  and  Roman  knew  it,  was  just  as  odd  and 
heterogeneous  and  indefinite. 

The  mind  of  the  Graeco-Roman  world  in  general  had 
reached  a  stage  in  which  it  was  unequal  to  the  task  of 
really  examining  an  idea.  The  unexamined  life,  if  we 
may  pervert  the  phrase  of  Socrates,  was  the  only  one 
liveable  for  a  real  human  being;  in  this  age  the  Socratic 

2  Cumont,  Oriental  Religions,  pp.  87,  88. 


THE  VICTORY  OF  THE  ORIENT          335 

passion  for  definition  and  for  exact  ideas  was  lost.  Men 
re-acted  to  suggestion  and  to  sentiment,  now  to  this,  now 
to  that;  coherent  thinking  was  beyond  them.  Even 
Stoicism,  in  spite  of  its  central  principles,  had,  as  we 
saw,  its  unexamined  elements,  doctrines  insufficiently 
explored  and  too  loosely  related  to  the  facts  of  Nature. 
The  intellectual  effort  (such  as  it  was)  of  Scepticism 
was  beyond  most  men;  and,  except  when  disguised  in 
bodily  and  social  comfort,  Scepticism  would  seem  never 
to  have  appealed  to  women.  Fear  overcame  what  power 
of  thought  was  left,  and  fear  ruled  once  more  in  religion. 
No  doubt,  qualifications  have  to  be  made  in  all  this; 
every  universal  statement  is  liable  to  need  them.  But  as 
one  surveys  the  literature  of  the  Roman  World,  when 
once  Cicero  and  Virgil  are  gone,  one  cannot  help  noticing 
how  very  second-rate  the  best  of  it  is,  Greek,  Jewish,  and 
Latin;  and  the  literature  of  an  age  is  apt  to  reflect  pretty 
accurately  its  thinking  power.  Tacitus,3  perhaps  the 
most  powerful  mind  among  them,  balances  the  opinions 
of  the  ancients  and  their  modern  disciples  as  to  whether 
fate  or  chance  rules  all  mortal  things;  and,  without  de- 
ciding that  point,  he  concludes  by  observing  that  the  mass 
of  mankind  cannot  get  rid  of  the  idea  that  "there  is  a 
lot  in  Astrology,"  but  that  astrological  forecasts  mis- 
carry through  the  ignorance  or  trickery  of  those  who 
make  them.  Pausanias,  about  A.D.  180,  travelled  over 
Greece,  and  was  initiated  here  and  there  where  oppor- 
tunity offered;  he  was  frankly  a  believer  in  the  religion 
of  the  day  and  as  frankly  third-rate.  Lucian's  Lover  of 
Lies  is  a  witty  parody  of  what  educated  people  could 
talk  and  believe  in  the  way  of  marvels.  It  reminds  one 
of  to-day,  though  with  a  suggestion  of  extravagance  in 
invention;  but  as  one  reads  in  the  literature  of  that 
period,  it  grows  clear  that  the  parodist  is  a  good  deal 

S  Annals,  vi.  22. 


336  PROGRESS  IN  RELIGION 

closer  to  what  he  is  mocking  than  one  supposed,  that  it 
is  far  from  being  mere  travesty.  Celsus,  in  his  True 
Word,  written  against  the  Christians  in  A.D.  178,  assumes 
the  reality  of  the  theophanies  and  miracles  of  the  pagan 
shrines.  Aristides  believes  in  the  healings  of  Asclepios 
at  Epidaurus  as  surely  as  the  most  ignorant  French 
peasant  believes  in  those  of  Lourdes,  and  with  as  little 
idea  of  the  real  explanation  of  them. 

Stoic  teaching  of  the  sympathy  of  Nature,  of  the  cor- 
respondences between  everything  in  the  world  and  every- 
thing else,  gave  a  philosophic  basis  to  the  belief  in  what 
we  must  call  Magic.  Even  to  this  day  certain  types  of 
mind  cannot  distinguish  between  proof  that  a  thing  may 
happen  and  proof  that  it  has  happened,  and  as  little  be- 
tween evidence  that  something  has  happened  and  evidence 
that  the  explanation  tendered  for  it  has  any  relation  to 
the  matter  under  discussion.  To  assimilate  more  or  less 
the  idea  of  chemical  action  being  possible  between  all  or 
most  elements  in  Nature,  is  enough  to  warrant  some 
people  in  concluding  that  all  thought  and  all  religion  are 
chemical  products.  The  ancients  had  more  excuse. 
Their  terminology  betrayed  them.  Pncutna  meant  per- 
haps "breath"  or  "wind"  to  start  with ;  it  came  to  mean 
"spirit"  in  something  approaching  our  sense  of  the 
word;  and  in  speaking  of  Delphi  Plutarch  uses  it  much 
in  the  sense  of  the  modern  "gas,"  but  he  does  not  realise 
that  "spirit"  and  "gas"  really  mean  two  distinct  things. 
It  is  easy  for  him  to  believe  that  the  "gas"  coming  (or 
supposed  to  come)  from  the  crack  in  the  ground  at 
Delphi  affects  the  "spirit"  of  the  priestess  or  is  the 
prophetic  "spirit"  in  which  she  speaks,  or  in  less  modern 
phrase,  is  the  "spirit"  that  enters  into  her  and  speaks 
through  her  lips.4  The  poem  entitled  Lithica  teaches 
that,  with  the  proper  stone  in  hand  and  the  proper 

4  Plutarch,   de  defectu  oraculorum,  432   D-435   A;   437   C. 


THE  VICTORY  OF  THE  ORIENT          337 

prayer- formula,  a  man  may  influence  or  control  the  god 
whose  affinity  is  with  that  stone  or  who  is  amenable  to 
that  formula.5  Perhaps;  but  it  was  never  demonstrated 
that  the  god  or  any  other  god  really  was  attached  to  that 
stone,  gem  or  other,  or  that  the  belief  that  it  was  "in 
sympathy"  with  him  (in  "true  consent,"  to  use  Milton's 
words),  was  anything  more  than  the  very  loosest  assump- 
tion. Still,  for  the  quick  thinkers,  given  sympathy,  there 
was  the  system  of  gem  and  formula  justified,  access  to 
gods  established,  and  even  control  of  gods  assured — 
"proved,"  as  loose-thinking  moderns  of  the  same  type 
say — "by  Science." 

But,  even  apart  from  philosophic  or  scientific  theory, 
the  religious  ideas  of  the  period  rested  on  experience, 
though  the  evidence  of  experience  was  handled  as  loosely 
as  this  doctrine  of  sympathy.  Mysticisim  is,  as  Dean 
Inge  has  reminded  us,  one  of  the  most  carelessly  used 
of  words,  more  indefinite  even  than  Socialism.  So- 
called  mystical  experiences  may  be  induced  in  a  number 
of  ways,  notably  by  hunger  and  by  certain  drugs;  and 
when  they  have  such  origins,  it  is  hard  to  believe  that 
they  can  really  contribute  to  a  man's  religious  knowledge. 
When  instead  of  hunger  we  say  "fasting,"  and  when  the 
man  is  one  with  religious  interests  or  preconceptions,  a 
different  problem  occurs.  It  seems  likely  that  no  one 
sees,  feels  or  hears  anything  in  the  mystical  state  which 
he  had  not  already  laid  up  in  conscious  or  sub-conscious 
memory;  but  it  is  commonly  said  that  what  comes  in 
the  mystical  state  comes  with  a  new  emphasis,  a  new 
value  and  meaning.  I  incline  to  think  that  new  emphasis 
is  more  near  the  truth  than  new  meaning;  and  I  believe 
that  some  part  of  the  new  attention  given  to  the  idea 

5  Cf.  Lithica  (Eugen  Abel),  226-7;  and  330-3  (the  magnet  bends  the  gods). 
On  this  book,  see  W.  Von  Christ's  Gesch.  Gr.  Lit.  (sth  ed.),  vol.  ii.  p.  376; 
he  says  it  is  a  poetic  rendering  of  a  prose  book  of  the  second  century  A.D.,  at- 
tributed to  Damigeron  the  magician,  a  work  which  a  mediaeval  bishop  eventually 
got  into  Latin  verse  and  which  in  that  form  had  a  wide  influence. 


338  PROGRESS  IN  RELIGION 

so  emphasised  is  due  to  the  strangeness  of  the  phe- 
nomenon and  to  the  theory  that  it  is  of  directly  divine 
origin — divine  in  a  way  that  respiration  and  digestion 
are  not  so  reckoned.  A  man  once  told  me  how  in  a 
trance  a  certain  text  was  given  to  his  father,  "which  he 
had  never  heard  before."  It  is  notorious  that  memory 
does  not  advertise  all  her  methods,  and  that  words  are 
frequently  found  to  have  been  stored  of  which  no  notice 
was  taken  at  the  time;  but  the  two  men  had  only  one 
theory — the  text  came  by  special  divine  communication. 

From  our  records  of  religious  experience  in  the  period 
of  Graeco-Roman  culture  with  which  we  are  dealing,  it 
is  plain  that  much  attention  was  given  to  phenomena  of 
this  kind,  and  that,  as  in  the  case  just  mentioned,  there 
was  only  one  explanation  available.  Men  believed  the 
evidence  of  their  senses;  they  had  seen,  they  had  heard, 
and  there  was  an  end  of  it.  And  behind  their  experience 
stood  that  of  others,  and  a  theory  that  fully  explained 
everything.  Then,  by  a  swift  deduction,  all  was  true 
that  the  Oriental  priests  taught  of  religion.  Science  in 
the  form  of  Astrology,  Philosophy  and  Experience  all 
combined  to  rivet  the  chain  of  superstition. 

Certain  common  features  are  to  be  found  in  these  cults 
of  the  East.  We  know  little  of  any  ways  in  which  they 
recruited  or  trained  their  priests.  Our  records,  which 
are  generally  satirical,  suggest  very  great  looseness  of 
organisation  in  some  of  the  religions.  But  the  priest  is 
a  constant  factor,  an  inevitable  adjunct  of  worship,  a 
celebrant  in  a  daily  ritual,  an  interpreter  and  a  mediator 
between  gods  and  men.  The  sacrament  is  his  business, 
and  without  sacrament  and  priest  there  could  be  no  com- 
munion with  heaven.  The  mystical  trance  was  prepared 
for  systematically.  Even  if  it  came  of  itself,  it  was  the 
business  of  the  priest  to  lead  the  worshipper  from  stage 
to  stage.  The  classical  document  on  this  is  the  last  book 


THE  VICTORY  OF  THE  ORIENT          339 

of  Apuleius'  Golden  'Ass.  Apuleius  describes  one  stage 
after  another,  all  associated  with  deep  emotion,  some 
blest  with  actual  vision  of  the  gods  in  person,  and  all 
more  or  less  expensive.  Abstinence  from  food  and  other 
things  for  the  purpose  of  immediate  religious  action, 
penances  for  specific  acts,  and  asceticism  on  a  larger 
scale,  went  together.*  A  feeling,  still  not  uncommon, 
that  the  body  and  its  concerns  are  on  a  lower  plane  than 
the  soul  and  its  preoccupations,  was  reinforced  by  a 
theory,  more  general  and  of  high  antiquity  and  authority, 
that  matter  was  inferior  every  way  to  spirit,  a  negation, 
somehow,  in  the  long  run,  of  God.  This  theory  the  phi- 
losophers accepted;  and  a  conception  of  holiness  arose 
which  made  it  largely  an  external  and  negative  thing. 

The  power  of  these  Oriental  religions  and  of  the  be- 
liefs they  carried  with  them  may  be  recognised  by  their 
effect  in  two  distinct  regions.  The  Roman  government, 
as  we  have  seen,  was  at  first  far  from  friendly  to  the 
cults  that  brought  their  exotic  appeal  to  bear  so  strongly 
on  Roman  men  and  Romen  women.  From  time  to  time 
the  cults  were  driven  out  of  Rome,  but  they  returned, 
and  "in  proportion  as  Caesarism  became  more  and  more 
transformed  into  absolute  monarchy,  it  tended  more  and 
more  to  lean  for  support  on  the  Oriental  clergy."  T  This 
movement  reached  its  height  under  the  dynasty  that  suc- 
ceeded the  son  of  Marcus  Aurelius — a  curious  illustra- 
tion of  time's  revenges.  How  far  the  Christian  Church 
stood  from  the  ideas  of  the  Oriental  cults  is  written  in 
every  page  of  the  Gospels;  and  as  one  learns  more  of 
what  the  cults  taught,  and  of  the  ideas  and  preconcep- 
tions on  which  they  worked,  and  which  became  more 
and  more  the  background  of  religious  thinking  in  the 
Graeco-Roman  world,  the  bright  independence  of  Jesus 

•  Jtiyenal,  vi.  522  f. 

7  Cumont.  Astrology  and  Religion,  p.  96. 


340  PROGRESS  IN  RELIGION 

of  Nazareth  grows  in  significance.  Even  Ignatius  can 
write  to  the  Ephesians:  "What  ye  do  even  after  the 
flesh,  is  spiritual ;  for  ye  do  all  in  Jesus  Christ."  8  Yet 
Ignatius  has  a  rather  magical  view  of  the  sacraments, 
for  he  writes,  in  the  same  letter,  of  the  Ephesians 
"breaking  one  bread,  which  is  the  medicine  of  immor- 
tality and  the  antidote  that  we  should  not  die  but  live 
for  ever  in  Jesus  Christ."  9 

The  common  background  of  all  religious  thinking  out- 
side Judaism  was  made  by  the  mystery  religions.  Their 
conceptions  gave  men  what  they  would  have  called  in 
our  speech  their  "natural"  ways  of  thought;  but  the 
word  "natural"  is  one  of  those  epithets  which,  the 
logicians  say,  beg  questions.  The  Christian  vocabulary 
shows  many  parallels  with  the  language  of  the  mysteries, 
or,  more  strictly,  many  terms  occur  in  both,  and  these 
terms  of  great  significance.  The  Christian  and  the 
adherent  of  the  mysteries  may  describe  central  points  of 
their  religions  in  the  same  language;  but  this  does  not 
imply  that  they  meant  the  same  things,  or  that  they 
started  from  the  same  premises  or  looked  to  the  same 
goal.  The  same  term  may  be  used,  but  it  is  the  mark 
of  a  beginner  to  suppose  that  words  can  have  the  same 
value  when  used  by  genius  and  by  common  people. 
Spiritual  insight  differs ;  and  however  alike  the  language 
of  two  thinkers  may  be,  it  is  the  measure  of  their 
spiritual  insight  that  gives  meaning  to  their  words.  Wit, 
for  example,  ,is  in  ordinary  life  an  idea  that  divides 
people;  fortunately  we  have  not  all  the  same  conception 
of  it.  In  religion  the  great  terms  habitually  divide  men 
who  think  deeply  about  them. 

But  that  the  language  of  these  mystery  religions  found 
its  way  into  the  Christian  Church— and  very  often  the 

8  Ignatius,  Eph.,  8,  2. 
fl  Ignatius,  Eph.,  20, 


THE  VICTORY  OF  THE  ORIENT          341 

ideas  behind  the  language  came  with  it — as  the  practice 
of  them  imposed  itself  on  the  state,  is  for  our  purpose 
very  significant.  The  early  Christian  owed  a  great  debt 
to  Plato  and  to  the  Stoics,  which  again  and  again  he  was 
glad  and  proud  to  acknowledge,  though  at  times  he  ex- 
plained it  by  a  previous  indebtedness  of  Greek  philosophy 
to  Moses;  Plato  was  "Moses  talking  Attic."  10  His  rela- 
tions with  the  mystery  cults  were  different;  they  were 
of  the  devil,  and  any  parallels  that  could  be  drawn  be- 
tween them  and  Christianity  were,  as  Justin  and  Ter- 
tullian  said,11  due  to  the  devil's  having  stolen  the  ideas 
of  God,  and  of  course  depraved  them,  as  the  devil 
naturally  would.  But  the  explanation  is  interesting  in 
another  way;  it  seems  to  imply  that,  behind  the  parallel 
of  usage  and  borrowed  speech,  there  lies  for  those  who 
care  to  look  a  more  real  parallel  in  religious  conscious- 
ness. The  heathen  in  these  borrowed  and  debased  forms 
is  seeking  to  meet  the  same  needs  that  the  Christian  feels 
and  meets  in  a  nobler  way.  He  is  asking  for  a  personal 
god,  who  shall  be  susceptible  of  relations  with  men,  for 
the  recognition  of  all  that  is  implied  in  human  nature 
and  for  immortality. 

The  whole  story  of  heresy  in  the  Christian  Church,  in 
the  early  church,  is  of  struggles  to  adjust  the  new  im- 
pulse from  Palestine  with  the  religious  inheritance  of  the 
Orient  generally,  modified  by  the  influence  of  Greek 
philosophy.  In  one  heresy  philosophy  plays  a  larger  part, 
in  another  Oriental  cult.  This  ferment  of  ideas  is  char- 
acteristic of  the  Roman  Empire.  With  all  the  weakness 
and  indolence  of  thought  which  we  have  noted — perhaps 
in  some  degree  the  very  consciousness  of  weakness  was 
part-cause — men  were  seeking  ultimate  truth  in  the 
pooling  of  ideas.  The  barbarians,  in  that  phrase  of 

10  Clem.  Alex.,  Strom.,  i.  150,  4,  quotes  this. 

11  See  p.  no. 


342  PROGRESS  IN  RELIGION 

Celsus  which  I  have  quoted  so  often  in  these  pages,  dis- 
covered the  dogmata  somehow,  and  the  Greek  tried  to 
give  them,  or  to  educe  from  them,  that  intellectual  co- 
herence whieh  should  make  their  value  plain,  to  relate 
them  to  "all  time  and  all  existence."  For  six  centuries, 
for  two  before  and  four  after  the  Christian  era,  we  may 
say  that  this  was  the  chief  task  which  thinkers  had 
before  them.  It  was  handled  in  many  ways. 

Plutarch  for  instance — Sir  J.  P.  Mahaffy  held  there 
was  "no  more  signal  instance  of  this  stagnation  than  the 
sayings  and  counsels  of  Plutarch  on  politics  and  re- 
ligion" and  art.12  Then  Plutarch  is  a  representative 
man.  He  shows  how  common  minds  were  occupied  with 
this  business  of  reconciliation.  A  patriotic  Greek  could 
have  no  doubts  about  the  wisdom  of  his  people — 
Epicurus  excepted  and  Herodotus.  Greek  philosophy 
was  a  mine  of  truth,  and  if  one  looked  at  its  teachings 
in  a  certain  way  they  were  not  really  so  inconsistent 
with  Oriental  religion.  Or  perhaps  it  was  that  by  some 
unconscious  selective  instinct  he  chose  in  Oriental  re- 
ligion what,  by  virtue  of  its  inherent  vagueness  and  his 
own  gift  of  confusion,  he  could  suppose  to  harmonise 
with  Plato.  How  little  it  did  harmonise  with  Plato  is 
seen  in  his  treatment  of  obscene  myth  and  statue.  "Myth 
is  a  rainbow  to  the  sun  of  truth,"  he  said;18  and  if  the 
image  of  Osiris  seemed  obscene,  triply  obscene,  it  was 
an  allegory  in  the  round,  a  symbol  of  the  divine  origin 
of  all  existence.  There  is  nothing  that  Plutarch  cannot 
talk  himself  into  believing  to  be  right — though,  to  be 
fair,  he  stopped  at  human  sacrifice  and  some  obscene 
rituals  which  he  attributed  to  evil  daemons.  For  the 
rest,  allegory  did  wonders.  But,  said  Plato  long  before, 
we  are  not  at  liberty  to  tell  lies  about  God,  whether  they 

12  Silver  Age  of  Greece,  p.  371. 

13  Plutarch,  Isis  and  Osiris,  20,  358  F. 


343 

are  allegories  or  whether  they  are  not  allegories; 14  and 
the  study  of  Plutarch  and  his  contemporaries 15  confirms 
one  in  the  conviction  that  Plato's  instinct  in  this  was 
sound.  Plutarch  did  not  mean  Truth,  his  aim  was 
apology ;  he  was  afraid.  His  father,  as  he  tells  us,  depre- 
cated inquiry  of  a  certain  sort ;  it  unsettled  faith,  it  weak- 
ened or  destroyed  the  very  foundation  of  all  religion; 
and  Plutarch's  whole  attitude  to  life  is  the  same,  though 
less  explicit.  The  religious  usages  of  his  day  ministered 
to  his  peace  of  soul;  the  "dear  Apollo"  was  the  friend 
of  man;  the  religion  of  Isis  and  Osiris  was  not  incon- 
sistent with  the  dignity  of  Greek  thought.  He  too  is  a 
witness  to  the  demand  of  the  human  soul  for  three  of 
the  things  in  religion  which  we  have  traced  so  far;  but 
the  other,  the  life-nerve  of  all,  he  does  not  recognise  so 
clearly,  the  demand  for  Truth,  the  insistence  on  funda- 
mental Righteousness.  His  religion  satifies  every  desire 
of  the  human  heart  except  that;  and  on  that  failure  it 
was  ultimately  wrecked,  and  mankind  ceased  at  last  to 
take  any  interest  in  it  whatever. 

A  figure  of  more  interest  with  scholars  to-day  than 
Plutarch  is  the  earlier  scholar  Posidonius.18  It  is  partly 
that  his  works  are  lost  in  the  Greek  and  that  he  offers 
accordingly  a  richer  field  for  conjecture — omne  ignotum 
pro  magnified;  partly  that  he  led  the  way  for  that  recon- 
ciliation of  religion  and  philosophy  which  pervades  the 
ancient  world  in  the  period  under  our  review;  partly  that 
he  appears  to  have  been  a  philosopher,  and  not  a  blunder- 
ing, if  amiable,  moralist.  It  is  ungrateful  to  speak  so  of 
Plutarch,  who  had  obviously  claims  to  survive  which 
Posidonius  had  not.  Posidonius  was  born  at  Apamea 
on  the  Orontes  about  135  B.C.,  but  it  is  not  known 

14  Plato,  Rep.,  ii.  378  D;  cf.  p.    186. 

l«  Plutarch's  dates  are   (rather  roughly)   A.D.  50-130. 

16  Cf.  E.  Bevan,  Stoics  and  Sceptics,  85  ff . ;  Cumont,  Astrology  and  Religion, 
pp.  56,  69,  84!.,  93,  101;  J.  B.  Mayor's  Cicero,  de  N.D.,  ii.,  Intro.,  pp.  xvi- 
xxii;  Dreyer,  Planetary  Systems,  p.  176. 


344  PROGRESS  IN  RELIGION 

whether  he  was  of  Syrian  or  of  Greek  extraction.  He 
served  as  ambassador  from  Rhodes  to  Rome  in  86  B.C., 
and  Cicero  attended  his  lectures  in  Rhodes  in  78  B.C.  It 
is  held  that  large  parts  of  Cicero's  philosophical  works, 
e.g.  his  criticism  of  Epicureanism  and  his  account  of 
divination,  are  translated  from  his  teacher,  or  at  least 
closely  modelled  on  him.  He  was  primarily  a  Stoic,  but 
he  discarded  the  rigidity  of  the  school  and  modified  its 
doctrines  to  meet  the  teaching  of  Plato  and  Aristotle. 
He  was  the  first  thinker  to  establish  the  true  theory  of 
tides 1T — a  matter  that  earlier  Stoics  would  have  consid- 
ered trifling.  The  same  intellectual  energy,  with  perhaps 
some  inherited  interest,  turned  him  to  Asiatic  astrology  " 
with  less  fortunate  results,  to  daemonology,  too.  The 
influence  of  Posidonius  is  felt  in  the  Astronomica  of 
Manilius,  a  work  which  reveals  a  mind  of  rare  purity 
and  signal  in  its  detachment  from  superstition.  But  the 
system  of  the  world  conceived  by  Posidonius  was  dis- 
figured with  a  credulity  about  forecasts  derived  from  the 
stars  which  we  have  learnt — as  Augustine 19  had  to  learn 
— to  call  childish.  His  style,  which  Strabo  rather  un- 
kindly calls  "his  congenial  rhetoric,  his  enthusiasm  in 
hyperbole,"  20  appealed  to  his  day,  and  so  did  the  great 
range  of  his  outlook. 


17  Strabo, 

Mr.   Rice  Ho  

dence  that  he  ever  crossed  the  Channel"  in  spite 
trade  (Diodorus,  v.  38,  5)  attributed  to  him."  Mr.  H.  F.  Tozer  in  his  attrac- 
tive book,  History  of  Ancient  Geography,  p.  191,  is  as  definite  that  Posidonius 
did  visit  the  interior  of  Britain  and  study  tribe  life.  But  this  belongs  perhaps 
more  to  the  history  of  Britain  than  of  Religion,  though  the  discussion  may 
help  us  to  realise  the  man. 

18  Augustine,  de  Civitate  Dei,  v.  a,  Posidonius  vel  quilibet  fatalium  siderum 
assertor;  v.  5,  Posidonius  magnus  astrologus  idemque  philosophus   (cf.   Warde 
Fowler,    Roman    Ideas   of  'Deity,   p.    142,    "the    philosophical    wizard   of    Posi- 
donius") ;  a  discussion  of  astrology  as  it  bears  on  the  careers  of  twins.     See 
Garrod,   Manilius,  Astron.,  bk.  ii.,  pp.  Ixv.  f.,  for  a  discussion  of  astrology  at 
Rome;    and    p.   xcix,    "Thinking   men    in    Rome   necessarily,    in   the   period    in 
which   Manilius   lived,   breathed   an    atmosphere   of    Posidonius,    very   much    as 
thinking    men    to-day    may    be    said    to    breathe    an    atmosphere    of    Darwin." 
Manilius  did  not  exactly  write  with  a  copy  of  Posidonius  open  before  him. 

18  Augustine,   Confessions,  vii.  6,  8. 
20  Strabo,  iii.  c.  147. 


THE  VICTORY  OF  THE  ORIENT          345 

Here,  then,  was  a  teacher  of  genius  who  really  did 
"survey  all  time  and  all  existence,"  tides  and  stars,  Plato, 
Zeno,  and  the  learning  of  the  East,  and  he  wove  all  into 
one  fabric  in  a  reasonable  or  at  least  presentable  way, 
and  pronounced  that  man's  task  was  not  only  to  survey 
but  to  interpret — ot>  povov  Bsar^v  ct\\a  Half^^yi^rijv.21 
He  recognised  a  greater  power  in  the  passions  than 
orthodox  Stoicism  allowed ;  there  is  an  irrational  element 
in  man's  nature — the  source  of  evil  which  is  not  an 
external  thing.  He  gave  a  place  to  mysticism  in  religion, 
which  stricter  Stoics  denied.22  He  is  thought  to  have 
believed  in  the  spiritual  aid  of  daemons  and  to  have  given 
a  great  stimulus  to  Sun-worship  at  Rome.28  His  aim,  in 
Mr.  Edwyn  Bevan's  happy  phrase,  was  "to  make  men 
at  home  in  the  Universe";24  and  if,  as  is  supposed, 
Cicero's  splendid  and  stimulating  Dream  of  Scipio  is 
inspired  by  his  teacher,25  it  is  easy  to  understand  the 
appeal  of  Posidonius.  Here  the  world's  best  Astronomy 
is  related  to  the  strong  sterling  instinct  of  the  Roman 
to  serve  the  state  and  to  the  belief  in  the  immortality  of 
the  soul.  Nor  was  the  idea  that  souls  that  do  well  ascend 
to  the  stars,  confined  to  books;  Cumont  appeals  to  an 
"unlimited  choice  of  examples"  of  it  among  inscriptions. 
"The  venture  is  a  glorious  one,"  as  Plato  says  in  the 
Phaedo;  Cicero's  picture  stimulates  and  stirs;  but  the 
subtler  needs  and  aspirations  of  the  soul  are  not  there. 
With  Cicero  these  would  be  lacking  where  he  deals  with 
religion;  and  we  only  know  Posidonius  through  his 
pupils.  They  were  many  and  their  influence  was  wide- 
spread; but  the  world  let  Posidonius  go  at  last.  It  is 
suggested  by  Mr.  Warde  Fowler  that  he  was  not  really 

21  Cumont,  Astrology  and  Religion,  p.  101. 

22  Wendland,   hell.-rom.   Kultur,  p.    134. 

23  Wardc  Fowler,  Roman  Ideas  of  Deity,  p.  58. 

24  Bevan,  Sceptics  and  Stoics,  pp.  112,  98. 

25  Cumont,   Astrology   and  Religion,   p.    178;    Warde    Fowler,   Religions  Ex- 
perience of  the  Roman  People,  p.   383. 


346  PROGRESS  IN  RELIGION 

in  touch  with  the  utmost  reality  of  what  he  spoke  about ; 
and  Mr.  Bevan's  judgment  coincides.26 

Great  reconcilers  are  rarely  the  world's  real  leaders; 
they  sum  up  the  past,  and  however  much  they  may  be 
hailed  at  the  time,  however  necessary  their  work  may  be,  it 
is  temporary,  both  work  and  fame.  Even  rhetoric  does 
not  save  them.  For  us  it  is  of  import  to  remark  that 
Posidonius  owed  his  influence  to  his  acknowledgment  of 
those  instincts  in  religion  which  the  stricter  Stoics  ig- 
nored. So  far  he  was  right  and  contributed ;  but  in  spite 
of  his  brilliant  discovery  about  the  tides,  his  science  was 
defective,  and  he  rested  too  much  on  tradition.  His 
scheme  was  perhaps  too  facile;  and  it  lacked  the  power 
that  would  carry  it  past  the  breakdown  of  the  traditions 
it  embodied.  As  we  have  agreed  already,  it  is  the  factor 
that  makes  the  future  that  is  significant.  The  religion 
of  Posidonius  re-made  the  present — a  long  present  it 
was ;  but  it  lacked  the  life  that  a  competitive  religion  was 
soon  to  show,  and  the  power  that  goes  with  life  of  out- 
growing and  discarding  error. 

The  Stoic,  as  we  saw,  taught  the  individuality  of  man, 
but  urged  that  it  was  a  temporary  and  fugitive  thing, 
which  at  death  broke  up  into  the  various  elements. 
Posidonius  recognised  personality  as  something  of  more 
moment ;  and  he,  or  those  whom  he  influenced,  leant  to 
the  view  that  divine  or  half-divine  beings  come  in  touch 
with  human  personality,  and  that  it  survives  death. 
Once  again  we  note  the  discovery  of  the  reality  of  the 
human  soul  by  the  philosophers.  The  religious  had  held 
to  it  all  along,  but  on  grounds  that  remained  suspect. 
But  now  philosophy  is  driven  into  accepting  the  belief; 
only,  as  we  have  seen,  it  accepted  it  insufficiently  ration- 
alised, and  with  too  much  of  the  hastily  drawn  conse- 
quences of  the  religious  of  the  time.  The  central  thing 

28  Bevan,  Sceptics  and  Stoics,  p.  94. 


THE  VICTORY  OF  THE  ORIENT          347 

is  of  moment,  and  everything  in  religion  depends  upon 
it.  Ancient  religion  gave  way  because  that  central  truth 
was  not  disentangled  from  the  temporary,  the  trivial  ana 
the  false.  When  challenged,  it  had  only  authority  to 
plead  and  that  false  reverence  (not  yet  extinct)  which 
pretends  the  "holy"  to  be  exempt  from  examination. 
"When  religion,"  said  Kant,  "seeks  to  shelter  itself  be- 
hind its  sanctity,  it  justly  awakens  suspicion  against 
itself,  and  loses  its  claim  to  the  sincere  respect  which 
reason  yields  only  to  that  which  has  been  able  to  bear 
the  test  of  its  free  and  open  scrutiny."  But  reason,  as 
we  have  seen,  had  in  those  days  grown  very  nervous. 

So  far  we  have  traced  the  progress  of  religion  from 
the  days  of  Homer  or  before.  We  have  seen  how  man's 
experience  reacted  again  and  again  on  his  judgment  of 
the  universe,  on  his  religion;  how  he  came  to  ask  more 
of  the  universe  for  himself  and  his  own;  how  he  insisted 
upon  God  too  being  personal  and  on  righteousness  as  the 
base  of  all  relations  between  man  and  man,  between  man 
and  God,  the  foundation  of  all  existence.  This  way  and 
that  opinion  swayed,  as  men  laid  stress  on  one  or 
another  phase  of  the  problem  of  God  and  the  soul.  Over- 
emphasis on  sheer  reason  to  the  neglect  of  emotion  pro- 
voked reaction  against  philosophy.  Men  and  women  felt 
that,  in  spite  of  childless  theorists,  there  was  something 
real  in  their  feelings  for  one  another  and  for  their  chil- 
dren, that  there  was  in  fact  nothing  else  at  all  so  real, 
that  love  was  not  a  fugitive  and  irrational  sentiment 
linking  for  the  time  two  aggregations  of  senseless  atoms, 
but  the  necessary  and  reasonable  expression  of  per- 
sonality. The  philosophers  had  discounted  what  mat- 
tered most,  and  the  priests  emphasised  it.  World- 
weariness,  failure  of  nerve,  decline  of  the  race — call  it 
what  one  may,  religion  and  thought  were  not  working 
together.  If  the  Stoic  preached  the  righteousness  of  the 


34.8  PROGRESS  IN  RELIGION 

universe,  as  he  did  fervently,  it  was  a  righteousness  that 
ignored  personality  in  God  and  still  more  in  man.  But 
religion,  as  we  find  it  in  that  Graeco-Roman  world,  is 
also  astray.  It  has  recognised  personality  indeed,  based 
itself  upon  its  recognition,  even  pandered  to  it,  and 
missed  the  other  things. 

The  reconciliation  of  religion  and  philosophy  would 
not  do,  for  neither  was  building  on  really  thought-out 
principles.  The  philosophy  was  doctrinaire,  the  religion 
traditional — both  were  in  the  hands  of  pupils  who  did 
not  understand  their  masters.  The  philosophers  belonged 
to  schools,  except  where  they  escaped  into  the  false  free- 
dom of  Eclecticism;  "all  eclectics,"  said  Novalis,  "are 
sceptics;  the  more  eclectic,  the  more  sceptical."  The 
religious  were,  not  quite  unconsciously,  following  guides 
of  lower  powers  than  their  own,  savage  ancestors  and 
Oriental  charlatans,  much  as  men  turn  to  the  mediaeval 
to-day — happy  in  an  atmosphere  that  was  fatal  to  mind, 
to  independence,  at  last  to  manhood.  None  of  them  were 
fundamentally  concerned  with  truth  as  an  organising 
vital  principle;  they  pieced  it  together  as  a  puzzle  at  best. 
Their  data  were  doubtful,  and  they  had  lost  the  instinct 
for  examination.  A  structure,  however  ingenious,  how- 
ever cleverly  wrought  of  old  and  new,  modern  fancy 
blended  with  archaeology,  can  never  be  very  secure  when 
the  foundation  is  unsound;  and  here  it  was  unsound. 

There  was  no  finality  about  this  Graeco-Roman  syn- 
thesis of  creed  and  cult  and  dogma,  because  truth  and 
ethics  were  made  of  less  account  than  emotion  and  sen- 
sation. The  religion  was  beneath  the  best  men;  moral 
sense  revolted  at  much  of  its  teaching  and  practice,  and 
men  tried  to  deceive  themselves  with  words,  as  Plutarch 
did,  into  thinking  they  had  a  right  to  accept  what  they 
knew  to  be  unclean  and  untrue.  Secure  of  the  help  of 
their  gods — gods  borrowed  from  the  peoples  of  lower 


THE  VICTORY  OF  THE  ORIENT          349 

culture  and  of  retarded  growth — gods  conspicuously 
obsolete  for  men  taught  by  Plato  to  think  deeply  of  right 
and  wrong — they  might  live  on  the  lower  level,  if  they 
had  by  sacrament  and  ritual  made  things  right  with  their 
gods.  Asceticism  and  libertinism  went  together.27  They 
were  sure  of  personal  immortality  and  of  all  they  wanted 
for  themselves,  and  there  was  not  the  perpetual  challenge 
of  a  clear  view  of  progressive  righteousness.  They  were 
carried  away  by  an  excessive  individualism,  developed 
by  natural  reaction  under  a  government  that  discouraged 
individuality,  action,  and  any  broad  or  deep  concern  for 
the  good  of  mankind. 

The  religion  was  doomed  to  fail,  because  it  reverted 
to  a  conception  of  God  that  was  not  the  highest.  The 
motives  for  this  reversion  were  mean  ones — a  sure  sign 
that  the  thought  would  be  wrong  somewhere.  The  gods 
were  personal,  it  is  true,  in  a  certain  sense,  but  they  were 
not  righteous;  every  tradition  cried  aloud  of  outgrown 
morality;  the  worshippers  were  above  their  gods  in  de- 
velopment; but,  choosing  the  lower,  they  declined  to  it. 
Above  all,  with  all  their  juggles  about  deity,  they  had 
in  practice  refused  the  Monotheism  which  philosophy 
had  begun  to  conceive  and  now  in  reality  abandoned. 
That  Monotheism  had  been  itself  defective  in  the  per- 
sonal, so  that  even  in  its  abandonment  there  is  a  hint 
of  right  instinct. 

It  is  a  picture  of  a  world  astray.  All  the  right  instincts 
are  there,  but  they  are  scattered  and  working  against 
one  another.  Those  who  believed  in  divine  personality 
gave  up  divine  righteousness ;  those  who  believed  in  right 
and  in  the  unity  of  God,  undervalued  personality  in  God 
and  man.  Neither  way  could  there  be  progress.  That 
could  only  begin  again  when  the  scattered  elements  were 
re-united,  and  what  belonged  together  came  together 

arWendland,  hell.-rom.  Kultitr,  p.  168. 


350  PROGRESS  IN  RELIGION 

again.  The  future  was  for  a  religion  that  should  set  the 
highest  value  on  personality  in  God  and  in  man  and 
make  righteousness,  ever  more  deeply  conceived  of  and 
understood,  supreme.  Meanwhile,  the  world  was  in  a 
pitiful  welter  of  half-truths — manifestly  wrong  at  every 
turn;  and  yet,  as  Robert  Burns  says, 

And  yet  the  light  that  led  astray 
.Was  light  from  heaven. 


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